Disclaimer: Sadly, I do not own Sherlock Holmes or any recognizable character and am not making any profit by using them.
Author´s notes:Companion-piece to my story Stopping It; it makes more sense if you read that first, though this can probably stand alone as well.
I am no native English speaker and therefore apologize for any mistakes.
More notes at the bottom.
And now: enjoy!
o o o
Stop All the Clocks
o o o
Against his will, he had been forced to live with it. He still wasn´t accepting it, and he certainly couldn´t talk about it with his bloody therapist or anyone else, for that matter. Yet for some inexplicable reason, John Watson didn´t stop to function when Sherlock Holmes died. He breathed (automatically, of course), slept (rather fitfully and often interrupted by nightmares), ate (without appetite) and worked (also automatically; his earlier self wouldn´t have been proud, but then his earlier self didn´t exist anymore).
He paid his bills and sat down in front of the telly or with a book, but afterwards he could never remember what he had watched or read; it was simply a means to occupy his mind for a few hours so as to subdue his own thoughts.
He didn´t care if he wore the same socks twice or whether his shirt matched his pants, and he only went to the barber because his hair had grown long enough to tickle his neck, which drove him mad.
He hurt, and he grieved, and he couldn´t comprehend how his best friend could be dead, but somehow life went on. On good days, he was able to repress the thought until he was nearly able to forget about it; those were the days on which his patients at the surgery could actually glimpse a fraction of the old John if they were lucky.
On bad days, he felt like he´d start weeping any minute and had to make sure he didn´t look at the array of tabloids on the newsstands he passed on his way to work, because he´d very likely have gone berserk if he had seen yet another picture of Moriarty, or rather "Richard Brook" the martyr a.k.a. newly-dubbed saint, or worse, of Sherlock, demonized by the media with the same commitment they had used when celebrating him as a hero only a few months earlier.
No matter if the days were good or bad or simply just were, for John Sherlock´s death was ubiquitous, and he didn´t expect that to change any time soon.
And yet even after seven weeks, or more precisely, approximately 1183 hours, it would catch John off guard. He was sitting alone in his small rented room, having fled from Baker Street because he couldn´t bear the emptiness, wondering if he would ever be able to stop thinking; he understood Sherlock now, who often was- had been struggling with the incredible amount of data he was processing in rather short time spans, making him irritable and testy when the people around him didn´t manage to keep up. John recently found himself in the same situation of sometimes being unable to translate his thoughts into words people would understand, if for different reasons than Sherlock.
John´s thoughts kept revolving around his deceased friend and the absolute desolution his own life now seemed to offer. Fragments of a poem he had learned at school kept popping up in his head, had done so ever since the funeral. Nothing now can ever come to any good. Which was exactly what it felt like. Sometimes John became so angry at Sherlock that he got up and paced around the room, in an unconscious imitation of the dead detective; then again, he just wept.
On the aforementioned evening seven weeks or respectively 1183 hours and a few minutes after Sherlock´s suicide, John´s phone rang while he was wrangling with the poem to leave him in peace. He looked at the caller ID and saw that it was withheld. He was tempted not to answer, since it might once more be one of the sodding so-called journalists; the distraction however was surprisingly welcome, and maybe shouting at someone would help.
"The hell" he therefore breathed and pressed on the button.
"John."
He shouldn´t have answered. He wasn´t prepared for this. He wasn´t.
"John, are you there." It was a demand rather than a question.
Bracing himself, John took a deep breath: "Mycroft." He´d rather have talked to a journalist.
"I take it you haven´t cleaned out my brother´s room yet."
"I went there..." John´s voice gave out. He couldn´t say it. Not the name of the street, not his name.
"Look," he continued when he had himself under sufficient control, "we should just... give it time. Please don´t send a team, I´ll do it. Just not now. Time, I need time."
Mycroft was silent for a while; John couldn´t quite figure out how hard it was on him, or if he fully understood the difficulties John had dealing with it.
"Fine with me," the older Holmes finally said. "There´s one thing..."
A sense of foreboding settled in John´s stomach like a lump of ice, and he was half-inclined to hang up so that he wouldn´t have to listen to Mycroft´s next words. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. If only he could have.
"He did have a small bear called Nuffles," Mycroft said. "Had it since he was a toddler and used to carry it everywhere."
As expected, John wasn´t prepared to hear that. He felt tears welling up and quickly pressed his thumb and index finger onto the bridge of his nose in order to avoid it: "Mycroft-"
"It´s the only one of his stuffed toys that survived his experiments, though it´s quite loved off as they say," Mycroft continued, oblivious to John´s discomfort and with a rather flat voice, void of any detectable emotions. "I´m quite sure it´s still there somewhere. If you happen to find it among his possessions-"
John hurriedly reassured Mycroft that he would bring him the teddy if he found it and rang off so quickly that he was certain it counted as rude, but he couldn´t talk any longer.
He threw the phone down and covered his burning eyes with his hand. Nuffles. Oh, Sherlock. You frowned like thunder and you went away.
After a long while during which John sat motionlessly, he got up and turned on the ceiling light. It was much too harsh and actually unwelcome, but he couldn´t bear sitting in semi-darkness, or feel any semblance to cosiness reminiscent of 221B, for Sherlock´s death had left him bereft of anything like that.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one.
o o o
The End
Additional author´s notes:
The poem is called Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden, and all the lines in italics are taken from it. The line You frowned like thunder and you went away however is I believe from the poem "Johnny", also by W.H. Auden. I have smuggled it in.