Quiet Train
John opened his eyes.
For a second he was blinded by the bright light, then as his vision cleared he saw that there was something black obstructing his vision. He groggily raised his head and realized that it was his own sleeve.
No. Not HIS sleeve. He stood up unsteadily and looked at himself. He was wearing a dark coat much too big for him. The ends of the coat touched the ground, and the sleeves were so long they flopped about.
He furrowed his eyebrows in confusion as he realized whose coat this was.
His head was aching. He rubbed his eyes and tried to estimate how long he had been asleep. There was a faint sound echoing in his head, a sort of chug-a-chug, but he ignored it and looked around at his surroundings.
He paused. He was pretty sure that this was not the place that he had been in the last time he was awake. In fact, he could not remember the last time he was awake. Everything had a tinge of surrealism to it that John could not place.
He was in a train.
It was eerily quiet. The only sound was the rhythmic chug-a-chug as the train raced on to its unknown destination. The silence had an uncomfortable tenseness to it, the sort of silence that was asking to be broken, but to speak would seem like a crime in a silence like this. He looked out the window and saw trees and bushes racing by. Then he looked at the other passengers.
His heart nearly stopped.
There were passengers here and there, sitting scattered throughout the train car. Passengers sitting straight and still, unmoving, their eyes forward, their mouths shut. And John remembered every one of them.
A woman dressed all in pink with a daughter named Rachel. A fair Oriental woman with a thing for ancient teapots. An overweight night guard for an art museum. An athlete whose boomerang had been the death of him. A man whose death in the moor fueled rumors of a giant hound. And finally, the most dangerous criminal mastermind the world had ever seen, a man who had taken his own life and had smiled in the face of death:
Moriarty.
John's heart was pounding. "You...you're all dead," he whispered breathlessly.
Moriarty laughed. His brown doe eyes sparkled, as if this was all a good joke. It made John uncomfortable, the way his eyes looked. They were so innocent.
And so deceitful.
"No!" Moriarty said. "If we're all dead, then why is HE here?"
John turned to where he was pointing. On the far side of the train car, with his back turned to John, there stood a tall, thin man with a head of brown, curly hair. He was perfect, just like the man from John's memory. The only thing missing was his coat.
John stood frozen for a few seconds, staring at him. No. Impossible. Slowly he began walking towards him, the black coat trailing behind him on the ground. "Sherlock," he whispered. Then louder. "Sherlock! SHERLOCK!"
The silence lay in pieces before him. But still Sherlock did not respond as he stood, staring out the window. As if John was invisible.
John began running towards him, but he felt hands grabbing at him, holding him back. The aisle grew longer and longer and longer, Sherlock growing smaller and smaller and smaller until John had to squint to see him, had to scream in his mind to convince himself that he had just seen Sherlock, that this was real, this was happening. But every dead person from every case they had ever solved grabbed hold of him, kept him from Sherlock, kept him from the only person he wanted to see right now, the best man, the most human human being he had ever known...
Finally, after minutes, hours, maybe years of struggling he found himself in the back of the train, grabbing Sherlock's shoulders, turning him around to face him and...
John stared at him in horror. Those were not the piercing blue eyes and sharp cheekbones of his friend. Those were brown doe eyes that seemed so ironically innocent, a sinister, evil grin that John had hoped never to see again. He stared into the face of Moriarty, who began to fade away slowly, first his body, then his head, his doe eyes, until there was nothing left but his hideous Cheshire grin.
And echoing around somewhere in the train or John's mind were words that sounded as clear as day, words that he would never forget as long as he lived:
"Goodbye, John."
And he let out the scream of his life as he woke up in a cold sweat.
He breathed in and out, quickly, shallowly, trying to control his beating heart. Words, memories, little wisps of his dream still remained. Still, they floated throughout his mind, piercing words from a well-remembered voice.
Please, will you do this for me?
John swallowed and shut his eyes tightly, trying to block it out.
This is my note. That's what people do, don't they? Leave a note.
He bit his lip and covered his ears, tears seeping out of his eyes. He wanted it to go away. He wanted to forget Sherlock. Forget his voice. Forget he ever existed.
Nobody could be that clever.
"You could," John whispered, and buried his face in his pillow.
Just another nightmare, he thought.