"Won't Forget You"
A Sherlock One-Shot
Lips met his own in a bruising kiss that burned his skin. Imprinted itself onto his very soul. Love flared within him. Filled with warmth. Warmth that was just as quickly replaced with a sorrow that went too far. Sorrow that threatened to break him with every succeeding breath.
Anguished whispers in the darkness. The repetition of a name. His name. Over and over, a soundtrack that grew more painful the longer he listened.
Echoes of his life stretched before him and he had the strong urge to retch. It made him sick. Thinking of what could have been, of what he'd had already. Because nothing could bring it back. Nothing.
A scream met him in the cavernous hollow of his heart and he knew. He knew...
With a suffocating gasp, Sherlock bolted upright on the squeaking mattress that had become his bed. Disoriented, he searched blindly in the darkness for his mobile. His pulse was racing, his lungs expanding and contracting at an unnatural rate. Sweat or was it...dripped from his face and fell onto the already-soaked cot.
At last, his trembling fingers found the square outline of his phone. He gripped it unsteadily and clicked the thumb pad to brighten the screen. The light threw his emaciated visage into sharp, incredible relief. He hadn't eaten in over a week. This was the first time he had slept in days and it had been a complete accident. He didn't like to sleep now. Not because he considered it an unnecessary human function (though he did still believe that), but because of the dreams. They'd grown worse over the past year. Because he hadn't received any form of communication from him in over a year now. No texts, no e-mails, no drunken phone calls. Nothing. Perhaps his friend had found the will to move on. Perhaps he had already forgotten about socially awkward, mentally unhinged Sherlock Holmes.
Oh if only he could forget so easily. He wanted to forget. He wanted it more than anything. But he knew that the feelings, the love he felt for John Watson, would never go away. And the dreams were only making it worse. They were essentially the same every time he slept, which wasn't often given the torment he received when he did. They all started with the same pair of lips brushing against his. The same pair of hands knotting themselves in his curls, curling around the curve of his throat, flitting teasingly against his sides. The beautifully tragic spell would be shattered by the same broken voice saying his name. Repeating it until Sherlock was driven to the brink of insanity. Next came the flashes of a life he could have had. A happy life. A content life with the only person he had ever truly loved. And always the dreams ended with a scream. His scream in the darkness. Haunting him. Slowly suffocating him and reminding him of the man he had left behind.
He wanted more than anything to turn the dreams off. To rid them from his mind for good. Nothing thus far had worked. Fighting the urge to sleep had been pointless, obviously. The basic needs of his body would win out and he would be forced to endure these self-inflicted nightmares every couple of days.
When the dreams had first struck him, they'd made him violently ill. He would awake in the middle of the night and have to race to the loo to empty the stomach acid into the dirt-encrusted ceramic bowl. Now, the illness stayed within him. Stewing. Driving him closer and closer to his breaking point. Sometimes, he couldn't believe that this was what he had been driven to. Sometimes, he didn't want to believe that he was nothing like the man he used to be. He was no longer Sherlock Holmes, the world's only Consulting Detective. Now, now he was a man lost. And he knew why he felt so lost in the world, a world he had once been able to make perfect sense of with a cursory glance. Then, he'd still been able to hang onto the slim chance that John had not forgotten about him. The chance that he still cared.
The truth was that the world no longer cared that he was dead. His friends, the people he loved, didn't care anymore. They'd moved on with their lives. They'd accepted the fact that he was gone.
The first three years had been easy. Why? Because of John's constant text messages. Because of John's drunken voice messages. Because of John's incessant, sappy e-mails. Now, his phone remained silent unless Mycroft rang him. Even those had faded to once every three or four months. It sickened him. It hurt him.
He scoffed humorlessly. The infamous Sherlock Holmes daring to feel. Four years ago, the very idea would have been laughable to a lot of people. Now, all he could do was feel. Regret, sorrow, fury, guilt, and hurt. He wasn't at all the same man he had been. He had been transformed and he hated. He hated himself. He was disgusted with the man he had become. But he had no way to change, no reason to change.
And more than anything he was tired. Bone-tired. Of living this disgraced existence. Of living period. He wondered, for a brief second, what it would be like to give up. To just fall asleep in this tiny, cramped flat and fade away. No one would ever know. Mycroft would probably just assume he was being stubborn again. Molly, even though she had been in on the entire plan, hadn't spoken to him since that day four years ago. John, well John had obviously moved on already and still had no idea that he was actually still alive. At least he was for now.
He had never thought of death before, but he thought of it now. Because he had lost the purpose in his life. He had loved and lost and it was killing him. It had been killing him ever since he told John goodbye and he knew that unless something very drastic changed for him...
A quiet noise was emitted from his phone before he could finish his thought. He rolled his eyes and considered not even looking at the text. But then the phone beeped again with another message alert. And then again. And again. Mycroft rarely sent him multiple texts, not in a row like this. Which could only mean.
His hands trembling in earnest and his pulse thudding loudly in his ears, Sherlock uncurled his fingers from his phone and stared in shock at the screen.
So this was extremely hard for me to write. I went through about three or four re-writes of it because I wanted to get it right. Obviously, Sherlock is very depressed in this chapter. And if it wasn't clear from the text, he's been "dead" for a total of four years now. Three of those years John texted his phone off and on and in the last year, he's heard absolutely nothing from him.
Besides the obvious OOCness of Sherlock's character, I hope that somebody like it and will review it. I just hope that in reading the companion piece to this, more people will understand exactly why Sherlock is acting this way.
Much love. xoxoxo