And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
from "Out, Out—" (by Robert Frost)
The day after Sherlock died, John came back to 221B. There was no other place for him to go. He followed familiar streets around to the flat like a ghost, hospital ID bracelet still holding onto his wrist, leading him back to a door that stared at him like a dead eye.
A month later, he left. Finally for the last time.
That day was like all other days. The door opened with a heavy swing, into the stairwell without the lights on. The walls and the handrails shuttled him through dark spaces. Steps led him to the inner door, and he went through, his body tense with vague notions.
Inside the flat, all the piles of books of different colors and papers and cups on saucers still sat as if no hands had touched them since that last night. The detritus of another lifetime. Curtains, hesitant, let in a reminiscent morning. It touched on the books and the dishes and John, too, as he moved about.
Dust hung stagnant in the air, like in a museum exhibit. John stooped to pick up a book that lay spread-eagle on the floor, his bad leg protesting.
And then he couldn't stop noticing things once he'd started, standing there and seeing little signs of living that watched him in their perverse collections. Everywhere he turned, he could see the invisible hands of Sherlock Holmes, quiet and folded, resting on things that still wanted his touch.
He had always known that he couldn't stay, but the fact suddenly became sentient in his mind.
And John Watson went heavily into the night.
When police investigations were done and the postmortem had been completed, someone, presumably Mycroft, had swept in and carried away the body. And that was that.
Life moves on. Cases slink to Scotland Yard in packages of corpses and with the faces of missing children. Even with all they say that Sherlock did, Lestrade twinges guiltily when he thinks about him.
Even now, there was something in the man that Lestrade missed. Some erratic formula, a jumble of idiosyncrasies and variables. As a teenager in the country, Lestrade used to sit on the roof outside of his bedroom and watch the sky, and he had watched Sherlock with the same fascination— like witnessing a machine do its elaborate work, half of him the spectator, half wrapped up in his focus and precision.
When word got out, of course, there were inquiries, but Lestrade had buckled down and let the wave pass over him. It may have helped that he wasn't the only guilty party. He stared down reporters as best he could, and kept getting burned for Sherlock's sake.
But now, he sat in his office alone and stared, bleary-eyed, at the evidence reports open to him on his desk. He would never admit it, but a part of him told him to take it to Sherlock.
God, he wished he could smoke now— he leaned back in his chair and tried to relax, sighing heavily. The city waited outside his window, its sleek gleam always getting him. Shit. He wished he had never brought Sherlock in. He wished Sherlock hadn't ever seen him.
The city blurred and became warm as he rubbed his eyes and sighed.
He had never been detached enough from his work, but he could not help but think that, just somewhere, something living in Sherlock was unbelievably good.
John went to his therapist often. It didn't do him much good; he could never trust her enough to say what really mattered. Still, he sat in her chair and told her everything he felt, and even the things he thought he should feel. It took him a while to mention the emptiness. But when it was out, he knew it was true.
His life was just sleeping and working, moving on and sleeping. Like one long, continuous tunnel he drove through, always trying to reach the other side. Manila and sunlight. Memories, like ripples at the back of his head, trying to hold him.
He sifted through the memories at night sometimes in his new, quiet flat, the sands pouring through his fingers, ebony and translucent and bright. He remembered the case with the Junior Minister, when Sherlock had dug through a century's worth of boxes in that ancient attic. Remembered the chase on horseback, when the serial killer and his stallion had jumped that impossible wall. Glancing out the window to see Sherlock testing the strength of the balcony lining.
There were other, placid memories as well, peaceful but nonetheless eviscerating.
He remembered Sherlock working, sitting at his microscope for hours. Rushing to and from St. Bart's, dissecting the city both above and below. John took a deep breath, inhaling air as thick as his memories. Riding in the cab, laughing in the café, traveling traveling traveling on the streets in the rain.
When he rose, leaning on his cane, the memories faded away to deceptive shadows. It was those he had seen, transparent in their old flat, standing in the thick sunlight, holding on to books and microscopes.
Ella kept persisting that recording his feelings would help him, but when he tried to write, nothing came.
The thought of leaving London barely crossed John's mind. He walked down streets, watched trains as they flew past, but he never left. There was no place he could think to go.
He was at his best in the surgery, at work where he had to concentrate and the fluorescent lights cut the grey of the rain. Going through routines, wave after wave, riding them until he was out to sea and it was all just one big, infinite motion.
But even that ocean wasn't infinite. He'd leave, and there were the grey streets again. Soundless except for sound the city carried. He got home, and there was his silent flat, which he really hated. He'd watch telly or read the paper until he slept. In the morning, he rose and slipped on his mask.
John feared losing sight of Sherlock, but of course, he did.
Before the fall, there would be this silent agreement between Sherlock and John, the instance between this-might-be-dangerous and I'm-running-if-you-are. It was a slip of time, in the instance before they met glances, when the night moved its great flanks and slipped into and became them both.
John had a wary eye for things moving in the dark, and he'd point out their object. And then they would be on their way again, the night's seams splitting and ripping into something new and great and terrible.
What could he call those moments now? How could anyone else know how the blood in their two hearts pounded in one beat, how they became the streets and the silent alleys?
He thought back on all the things that Sherlock had left him, and in these bitter, most honest moments, he found himself to be half of a person. Ella had said this was nothing out of the ordinary. But she didn't know anything about him. All the things he knew himself to be were in Sherlock, and he wanted them back.
He wanted their brief time back again, so he could live.
But isn't that the way it always is? Prematurely old, and inconveniently young.
"He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions…"
- Isaiah 53:3-5