A/N: AU where John kills himself prior to his and Sherlock's meeting in "A Study in Pink". Here, Sherlock is called in to investigate the death. If you read my one-shot, Forgiveness Is A Beautiful Thing, these scenes here are alluded to.
Part I: Lost
"If a tree falls in a forest
and no one is around to hear it,
does it make a sound?"
-A philosophical thought
John Watson was done.
Too much.
No more.
The words resounded through the soldier's mind, tumbling round and round until no other words were clear in his head except for the four. Toomuchnomoretoomuchnomoretoomuchnomoretoomuchnomoretoomuchnomoretoomuch.
Shakily, he reached into his small rucksack. Since being invalidated from Afghanistan, he simply couldn't cope with being a civilian again. Once going out to the war zone, he had seen things that no man should ever see in his lifetime.
He remembered the time that he had failed to save the young girl in the surgery, and when her brother was brought in, succumbing to the eternal sleep not three minutes later.
He remembered watching as one of his fellow soldiers was fatally shot and he couldn't do anything to save her.
All of the people that he had unsuccessfully attempted to rescue from Death's cruel, cold, prying fingertips blinked in front of his eyes, one by one, in order. There was his mother, who fell to her end from a combination of physical abuse, cancer, and starvation; Harry, the dear sister that he lost to the drugs and alcohol he had tried so desperately for her to avoid; the civilians whose deaths he could remember as if it were yesterday; and each soldier and each comrade who didn't deserve to die so soon.
He recalled the eyes of the rebel who shot him directly in the shoulder. It isn't anything that you forget quickly- not the eyes filled with fear, rage, some regret, and an overwhelmingly deep amount of ethereal and eternal sadness. You never forget the tiniest hint of hesitation embedded in those eyes, the smallest glance of a face that expressed all of the meaning of I'm sorry. The moment before it happens, and feeling that moment stretch out for eternity.
You never fail to remember being shot by a person with a power- with the emotion to move you like that.
The rebel's eyes mirrored his own now as he reached for the gun in the rucksack.
Even with the PTSD, he still kept the gun inside of his pack. Despite his therapist's warnings of dangerous flashbacks or shocks, the gun was always loaded and ready to be fired in case of an emergency.
In this case, his life (or possible lack of one) was the real emergency.
He weighed the gun in his hands, feeling the trigger and trying to understand exactly how it would feel if the finger just slipped and the bullet was shot. Yet his decision rode on a tightrope, precariously dancing and tipping from one side to the other..
Coming to a decision, he ripped off a sheet from the notepad that sat on the hotel desk and scribbled down four simple sentences. Make what they will of that, he thought with the slightest trace of humour.
So that fateful Friday, John Watson swung the gun up to the side of his head and pulled the trigger, closing his eyes to join the ones that he had failed to save.
No one heard his body fall to the ground that day.
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