"Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all – "
"What rubbish." I thought as a slammed shut the book I had been flipping through for the past hour and threw it on the coffee table in front of me. My hope had quite literally fallen flat about a week ago and has forced me to wallow in the dark recesses of my own mind. For the past two hours, I have been sitting with John in the silent wasteland of his flat that even the usual obnoxiously loud London street could not penetrate.
Strange how everything becomes void when you're in grief. It's like your whole being is going through a restart process to try and fix the damage that has been inflicted upon it and you just run on autopilot for a while. However, nothing is truly restored to its original condition. It's only been a week since the incident happened and already I could see the change in John. He looked older, tired, and has lost ten pounds, which is unhealthy for the amount of time that it has taken him to lose it. I was trying with all effort that I could muster to try to keep John from falling back into the state he was in before his arrival at Baker Street, but I was failing miserably.
The silence, though, was good. At least we weren't crying. Perhaps we had finally past that stage and have finally come to terms with the fact that he was, indeed, dead. Next we would move on and then, finally, we would forget the great consulting detective who, although he was an irksome showoff, had managed to bring out the best in booth John and I.
This is why we get so aggravated and, on one occasion, violent when people who have only read the papers call him a fake and attacked him with other vicious words. I wanted to prove that Sherlock Holmes was one of the greatest men of our time and to do this, I would constantly make deductions about his accuser which was usually met with "Piss off," and the earlier mentioned violence. I knew John shared this desire with me. He'd even started to dedicate his blog to it. No one reads it, though. The blog that had once depicted the investigations and unbelievable stories of Sherlock Holmes and Company that had captivated public was now dead along with the man himself.
"Ava?" John quietly asked, piercing our bubble of silence.
"Yes?"
"How?"
"'How' what?"
"How did the two of you meet?" he posed, "I've never gotten to hear the story of how you and he became friends."
Over the years, I had been asked this question many times and it was usually accompanied by another question asking why I stuck around. I've never answered either, though; at least not with an answer they wanted. But with John, it's different. Years of practically living with me and he didn't even know how I'd come to Baker Street.
"It's a long and complicated story, John." I told him. It wasn't a lie. I hadn't met Sherlock at a coffee shop one day and decide then and there that that was the man who I'd follow to the end of the world. I honestly thought he was a pompous dick the first time we encountered each other.
"We have time. There's nowhere either of us have to be." He replied quietly still. There was a long pause.
"We meet at university." And that began our story.