The waiting is intolerable. Waiting for news, waiting for hope, waiting for a sign of anything, good or bad. Is he still breathing? His heart still beating? Or are they fighting to restore a rhythm, their weapons chest compressions and injections, and hopefully a defibrillator, if there's enough of a chance there.
John exhales slowly, trying to calm himself, to settle his thoughts and escape the circling of images, of ideas and theories, vague possibilities. His leg twitches, the one with the long-cured psychosomatic limp. (Sherlock, again, of course. Always solving those little problems, and getting himself into these bigger ones.)
But surely he's still alive. Surely he'll pull through, no matter how bad he looked in the ambulance. (Wouldn't be the first time that he did the impossible.)
The coffee is crap, like dark-coloured water. John finds it doesn't matter, needs something to do with his hands, to distract himself with mindless turning of the paper cup. (He's washed the blood off his hands, but still there's some embedded in the cracks of his nails that'll simply need time. More waiting, really.)
It's taking so long. Surely he still has a pulse.
(But what if he doesn't? What if there is that frenzied battle to keep life in his corpse-like body, to force his heart to keep beating? And what if it fails? What of it's asystole and there's no way to hold him, only let him go? What then? How could there be a world without him in it? John knows he asked the same last time, but at least then he was still living somewhere, even if it was unknown to everyone bar a few. It wouldn't happen again.)
It's numbness more than anything, a combination of numbness and restlessness. Numbness and worry, a buzzing of incomprehensible thoughts in his head that he can't escape and yet understands the basic meaning of, the kernel. (Black headstone with the real body six feet below, dressed in black and white, curls neater than ever they were in life, sewn up bullet hole.)
He can't lose him, not again. Not like this, so soon after getting him back. Yet, he also can't bear the waiting and lack of news (to know would be almost a blessing, one way or the other, without this uncertainty and sometimes he feels the world is disintegrating around him at the thought that he might be gone, and sometimes he feels he could cope, but mostly he feels overwhelmed with the multitude of possibilities and the waiting), feels an overwhelming urge to cling to him even though he can't, to clasp his hand with fingers pressed to the radial pulse as reassurance. All impossibilities now, while Sherlock is laid out in there with surgeons cutting him open to repair the damage of the bullet. A dichotomy, destruction in the name of healing and yet necessary. Always necessary.
Just like the waiting.