A/N: Hello, team. Thank you for your kind welcome. You're brilliant! This one is set immediately Post-Reichenbach. Please forgive my use of run-on sentences. I don't own these characters. Thanks.
John is still in the basement of the hospital, awash in harsh fluorescent lighting, three doors away from where they've put the body of his best friend. The halls down here have always reminded him of tunnels somehow—they have a real feel of the underground about them despite the typical floor tiles and plain walls. Perhaps it's something about the stale air—claustrophobic. Regardless, as John sets down the pen and glances up at the faces of the police officers in front of him, an internal instinct warns him that his body is running out of air. It's not, he knows it's not, so he ignores the warning.
"Is that it, then?" he asks quietly. The lead officer—not one he knows, and he's absurdly grateful for that in this moment—drags the file containing John's official witness statement back across the metal table.
"Yes, Dr. Watson. Thank you for your time. We'll be in touch if we need any further information." He says it with his head down, scanning the file, and John doesn't wait for him to look up before he leaves the room.
He takes the first turn blindly, interested only in putting distance between himself and that file, distance between himself and the swinging doors at the end of the corridor, the ones that flipped shut behind the body of Sherlock Holmes.
John's not paying any attention to where he's going. He takes another corner and then another. He knows his way around down here—it's not as if he hasn't spent any time near Bart's morgue—but there's a disconnect now. It all feels serpentine, labyrinthine.
He's dizzy within moments, his mind reminding him about the apparent lack of air. Pausing, he takes stock of himself: elevated pulse, cold hands, rapid, shallow breath. He should really sit down, it's possible he's going into shock, but he feels dangerously off-kilter and suddenly doesn't want to move.
Because the world just ended.
That's not true, of course it's not, the lights are still on, the people on the floors above are still working and bleeding and drawing breath, but somehow, it is true, it's more true than anything, it's true, it's true, and he's suffocating on how true it is because behind the swinging doors, one man is not working, not bleeding, not drawing breath. One man who is—was—life (maddening, a flurry, a bloody solar event) took a step into thin air and took all the air with him. And John can't think, can't think, can't breathe. And a sound pulses right up out of him, and he's sobbing, sobbing, back against the wall, face in hands, sobbing, sobbing about the end of the world.
And he doesn't know.
He has no idea that just a few feet away…just inside the next office's door... on the other side of the wall on which the doctor is leaning, a man in a dark coat stands listening. He listens, and his mind works, and he draws breath (though it's harder in that moment than it's ever been), and he presses his hands against the wall in an entirely irrational attempt to add to the forces that are holding the doctor up.
The sociopath label is nowhere to be found, because he feels this. He feels every sob from the man in the hall, and his body echoes them in tears, and he's sorry, so impossibly sorry.
But he must.
To keep the doctor in this world. To keep what is most precious safe. To make it right again, he must.
Breaking his own heart to save it.
By the time the man with the umbrella arrives, the doctor is gone, and the man in the dark coat has found an expression of steely intention. The brothers eye each other for a moment, before the younger slips out of his coat, puts on the anonymous replacement, and says, "Let's put an end to this, then."
And as the brothers walk away, the used-to-be-man-in-the-dark-coat makes himself a promise: he will undo this scene. Someday, he'll stand opposite John-perhaps in this very corridor-and he'll take whatever John throws at him, and there will be no walls to separate them, and his hands will finally, finally make contact.
Someday, when the threat is gone, he'll return for his heart.
And the lights will be on.
And the two of them will work, and bleed, and breathe.
And the world will not end.
Sherlock Holmes won't let it.