He remembers the way his heart quickened in his chest as he stood in an abandoned building, staring down at a dead woman clad in pink, and listened to Sherlock Holmes tell her life story even though he'd never seen her before that night. He remembers the way it raced as they ran through the streets of London together—chasing a nameless serial killer, the Golem, Sherlock's own crumbling reputation—it didn't really matter who or why, the effect on his heart was the same.
There was a moment when it stopped, too. A man ought not be able to run, to go on breathing, when his heart has stopped, but John ran out of Sarah's apartment that morning with his heart stone-still in his chest. He might as well have run all the way to Baker Street, too, because even in the cab he felt like he was running. All the while, his heart was frozen. It didn't start beating again until he saw Sherlock, not grievously injured or blown to bits, but sitting calmly across from his brother, playing his violin and asking John how his night had been sleeping on the lie-low.
He managed somehow to forget his terror in the face of his immediate exasperation.
His heart makes things easy now, by being, as far as he can tell, completely absent. If John were a man more prone to dramatics and metaphor, he would have said Sherlock Holmes had taken his heart with him, smashed it on the pavement below St. Bart's, along with his own overly-analytical skull.
Thinking it doesn't hurt anymore, not in the strictest sense. When the initial haze of pain finally subsided, a blessed tingling numbness set in. It's different from the paralyzing numbness—bored, a familiar specter mutters in his ear—that he felt when he was discharged from the army. This buzzes quietly below the surface of his necessary day-to-day activities, not a paralytic but an anesthetic. He has a job and a flat of his own. He goes to work, comes home, keeps things more or less tidy. He occasionally goes on a date or checks up on Mrs. Hudson. She hasn't rented their—the—flat out to anyone else. He supposes he knows at least a few of the reasons why, so he doesn't ask.
How many crimes go unsolved? How many murderers walk free? He doesn't know. He tells himself he doesn't care, but every night he closes his eyes to find a pale, bloody face staring at him out of the darkness. The eyes are empty glass, no spark of intuition. No quirk of the mouth or raise of the brow, no twitch of the jaw muscles. No annoyance, impatience, excitement…none of the things that so exasperated and captivated him. Just that dead, doll-eyed face streaked with tears and blood, telling him they failed. They missed something, and Moriarty beat them.
John refuses to believe, even to this day, that Sherlock ever lied to him before those lies he told on the rooftop of St. Bart's. He thinks there must have been a reason Sherlock wanted him to believe Moriarty's ruse, but he doesn't go looking for it. He's the one for legwork, for gathering data and dropping snarky asides. It was his job to remind Sherlock not to be too openly admiring of the crimes in front of the victims' families. Sherlock unraveled the puzzles, and with him gone John isn't sure the reason matters anymore.
For three years, his heart sits in his chest like a stone. Then, one day, it suddenly stutters to screaming life again.
He's in the graveyard. He feels like he's always in the graveyard. He visits the elegant black headstone often, too often for someone who's been dead for longer than John knew him. He never thought himself one to dwell on the past, but he can't let it go. He never brings flowers, and he can't stop coming back.
Every time, he asks again—silently—for that one more miracle. Sherlock Holmes did the impossible every day of his life, so why not ask it of him in death as well? His march to the gravesite is straight and solitary. He looks neither left nor right, so he never sees the other mourners paying their respects to lost loved ones, or new plots being dug. He doesn't notice that there are other regulars.
He has no idea that a pair of piercing blue eyes—living eyes, not the glassy orbs of his nightmares—watch him from the nearby shade just outside his peripheral vision. He watches, close enough to call out but never to touch, never to grasp hands or stand shoulder-to-shoulder, soldiers of a different kind in a much more subtle war. It's the compromise this ghost makes with himself, allowing this little bit of non-contact. If he were anyone else, he might wish that John would move on, stop visiting his dead friend and learn to be happy again. He can see that John isn't happy, even from a distance. He reads it in the way he stands and in the set of his mouth, not to mention the state of his collar and the part in his hair. Sherlock Holmes has only ever been what he is, and so he can't help it that a part of him is warmed that John returns so often to speak to him. He can't hear what he says. He wishes he could answer, just like on every other graveyard day.
On this day, however, something unexpected happens. It's happened before, and changed the course of events quicker than blinking. It ended a man's life last time, so this time it brings one back from the dead.
A car is passing on the street just outside the fence, and it backfires. John starts and looks in the direction of the sound, and everything in the world freezes but John Watson's heart. That starts beating so loudly and so hard that he thinks he would see it moving his chest by inches if he were to look down. If he could look down.
The tall, thin figure is just as he remembers it; every detail is sharp, more real than everything around it, darker and brighter at the same time. The pale, angular face with its high cheekbones and narrow chin, the dark curly hair, the black coat with the collar turned up to affect an air of aloof mystery. They're all so familiar, so real, and yet John feels like he's having another dream. His heart's desperate tattoo is louder than everything else. He can see the eyes, the expression on the face. The blue is afire with pain, with regret. The lips are drawn and set in that line that means an apology.
For a moment, for those first steps he takes in Sherlock's direction before the reality fully kicks in, John is drowning in his gratitude. His friend is back from the dead.
Thank you,he thinks under the throbbing of his newly awakened heart. Thank you, it's all I asked for, thank you so much.
Approximately three steps in, the gratitude fades behind the truth of the matter, and John is running full speed toward Sherlock, face contorted with fury. Sherlock is a fast enough runner, but it doesn't occur to him to try to get away. Maybe he doesn't fully register the expression on John's face, or maybe he doesn't understand it. Unlikely. Maybe he understands it perfectly, but has suffered this separation just as much as John has, and would rather be beaten to a pulp by him than run from him. Probably. Maybe he's just so flummoxed by this unexpected turn of events that he doesn't know what to do, but being that he's Sherlock Holmes, this last explanation is as highly unlikely as the first.
From a distance, the full-body tackle that throws them both to the ground looks for all the world like the embrace of two long-separated soul mates, reunited at last. For the second before John's fist connects with Sherlock's face, that's how it feels to both men.
Maybe once John has a chance to calm down, that's exactly what it will be.
Author's Note: I've never written for the Sherlock fandom before, but I can't stop turning over in my head what John's reaction is going to be when he finds out that Sherlock is alive. The canon Dr. Watson was somewhat glib about the whole thing, seemed to just accept it without a problem once Holmes explained, but our John is somewhat more volatile and expressive than that Dr. Watson, so I just don't know what will happen.
I realize that the meeting occurring in a manner even remotely similar to this is unlikely. I just had the scene in my head and I needed to write it out.