A/N: Just an old little thing that's been sitting on my computer for a while. Felt like I should post it already. Tell me what you think; I reply to every single review, my friends. Picture's not mine, cross-posted on AO3.
John didn't go to the funeral.
However much he wanted to, he knew it wasn't the best thing to do right now. Both for himself and for everyone else. Mycroft had been dubbed mourner in chief, apparently, but he did like to be in control of formal functions. He liked to be in control full stop. John wouldn't be surprised if it had been him (that is, his assistant) alone who had organised the entire thing.
Many had turned up, but most had been distant relatives or random members of the public. Some were of the homeless. All those people, showing up to save face, saying that they had believed and always will. But was that what they really thought?
John didn't think he could handle it. The press, the fakes. Being pointed at and whispered about behind the backs of hands about how he had been completely roped in, how he had been played and then broken by the fraud.
The psychopath.
No, he wouldn't play the victim, and he most definitely wouldn't cause a scene when it inevitably became too much. He would pay his respects alone.
Maybe Mrs Hudson would come with him.
–––
John left 221B at the start, but he returned eventually.
It was hard, how everything in the flat around him reminded him of Sherlock. It felt like everything was Sherlock's. The old newspapers, the textbooks, the homeware. It felt like John's stuff was what you would point at in a game find–what–doesn't–belong.
But it was a great place, and Mrs Hudson was willing to let him stay paying just his half of the rent for a bit. Just until he sorted out what he wanted to do.
He packed up Sherlock's equipment in cardboard boxes and moved it all into Sherlock's room. The detective had never really used the room; his bed was practically stale from disuse. Sherlock's sleeping schedule never had taken 'day' and 'night' into account – he chose to sleep whenever he believed he required it. That usually meant taken power–naps in front of his experiments, or falling asleep on the couch with the telly on in the background between cases. John had doggedly berated him about it, but the recalcitrant man–child had been adamant about some things. He had let John coddle him when he was injured, had let him make tea for him. But food and sleep was where he had drawn the line.
John had never given up though. Sometimes, Sherlock had even surrendered.
He decided that the flat needed a bit of rearranging too, once he had cleared away most of Sherlock's things. He didn't have the heart yet to give it a full makeover, though.
But a little change would do some good for now.
–––
There were good days and bad days.
It was never easier, not at all. It's just that some days were less trying.
The good ones consisted of him waking up, splashing cold water on his face and squelching any residual panic with the breathing exercises his therapist had taught him, and then getting ready for and going to work, coming home, having a beer or two while he watched telly or read or worked, before taking the maximum recommended number of sleeping tablets in order to get to sleep.
The bad ones were when his limp and intermittent tremor got so bad he had to call in a favour; when he didn't eat but drank instead; when his nightmares left him trembling uncontrollably and his cheeks salt–stained. Those were the days where everything in the flat reminded him – not of the good memories as he would have liked, but the ones of blood–splattered pavement and sightless eyes and falling, ever falling that seemed to eclipse everything else.
Drown it out, suck everything bone–dry, and leave it all grey and lifeless.
Those days, he would sit for hours on end – just staring at nothing – with his gun in front of him on the table, his trigger finger twitching. Those days he would be so very, very tempted to take more of those damn pills.
Those days it was more trying.
–––
Of the two of them, people often thought that it was Sherlock who was the addict. But that's not quite right.
Before Sherlock, John had the Army, action and adrenaline. And before that he had gambling. In fact, he had pretty much gone into the Army as a means of getting out of the whole gambling business.
They'd made a deal, he and his sister. He would try to break his addiction if she tried to break hers. So John had joined the Army, and Harry had joined A.A.
The Army had helped for a bit. Sure, he had felt the pull of his addiction every now and again, but with the intensity of his regime and the unpredictability of his job as a field medic, John simply did not have the opportunity to feed his gambling habit as much as his subconsciousness would have liked.
Which had been rather the point.
But it had soon become clear that John hadn't ridden himself of his addiction; he had simply switched channels, found another outlet. His addiction had turned to near–death, adrenaline–pumping, prickly situations. Danger had replaced gambling.
His mates in the Army hadn't known, though. They'd just given him a nickname for what he dared to do – Daredevil Johnny or something along those lines – because he was always the one man willing to take risks that almost no one else would even consider doing to save others. They respected that. They'd teased and heckled him often, called him a brave fool – or just a plain fool – but had genuinely looked up to him.
They never suspected a thing, because John was good at hiding what was really going on inside.
John had figured that this way, he'd be saving lives instead of thoughtlessly blowing money on strangers. This addiction to danger did some good – it helped people, and it didn't make John feel as if he really was just a useless addict, living a life that was nothing but the money, the game, and winning.
He had played to win, because he had always lost with everything else in his life.
When he'd been invalided, it was like the one right thing in life, the one good thing in his life had been wrenched right out of his clutching hands, leaving him restless and alone and useless again. Empty. He'd finally found a way to fuel his addictive personality in a way which made him feel as if he was more than his mistakes, and what had it come to in the end? Nothing. Everything he had worked for – all of it – was gone in a flash.
In the time it takes a bullet to tear through skin and muscle and sinew.
What good was he, when he couldn't save people?
He'd almost done it. Every night since coming home he would war with himself. Every night he wondered, is tonight the night?
Every night, he'd think about his stupid promise with Harry, regardless of the fact that she hadn't even lived up to her end of the deal, and he would click the safety on. He would put the gun back in its drawer.
Every night before falling asleep, he'd desperately hoped to God that something would happen to him the next day.
And one day, it did.
He soon realised that he'd been reintroduced to the battlefield, but this time, it was something else entirely that he would become addicted to.
Dr John Watson, M.D., ex–Army was not addicted to gambling, or danger itself. Not anymore. He was addicted to a life; a way of living, and with one person and one person only.
People thought Sherlock was the addict. They were right, sure.
But John was so much worse.
–––
Sherlock wasn't the only one that had died that day.
He had selfishly killed his best friend, too, in John's opinion. He had said all those horrible, horrible things, and John didn't think he would ever understand why.
Why he did anything, why he was the way he was, why he'd wormed his way into John's very essence and destroyed him from the inside out, the utter bastard.
It's a good thing Sherlock's not around right now, with his annoyingly accurate habit of reading John's thoughts.
John would have never heard the end of it, with all the hyperboles and expletives his brain is screaming endlessly.
–––
Of course, John had no idea that Sherlock had killed them both to save him. To save them. And not for the first time, either.
He had no idea at all.
It's impossible to tell if knowing that would have made it better for John.
–––
The first time something happened after the end of it all, it wasn't too long after.
It was a good day, or at least it started off as one. John was having less and less of those lately, so he clung on to the ones he had like his life depended on it.
Which, he supposed, it kind of did.
John was puttering about in the kitchen, making his morning cuppa. The familiar routine had been soothing before, but now he was still trying to break the habit of taking out two mugs.
After all, it wouldn't do to waste tea.
He was just about to drop a teabag into his mug when he heard it.
Music.
Specifically, violin music.
It was something strained and slow and melodious, and it made something in John's chest ache. It wafted gently, quietly brilliant and so very, very familiar, through to the kitchen from the living room, warming John's heart like morning sunlight finally streaking through a window, like a rare domestic night in the flat.
He didn't remember turning the radio or telly on, and he didn't think Mrs Hudson had popped around to do so – and yet, it was most definitely coming from the living room.
He walked out of the kitchen and upon reaching the living room he saw the radio and the telly were both off. Naturally, there was no one in the room, either.
Nothing appeared to be any different.
And yet John could still hear the music, clear as a bell and as real as anything.
–––
The second time something happened, John was at work.
He was finishing up for the day, doing some paperwork at his desk. It was getting late, seeing as he'd stayed on a bit longer than usual to while the time away. Everyone else had gone home, and it was his job to lock up for the night.
He'd tried not to think about that day at the flat when he'd heard violin music coming from nowhere. In fact, he'd actively avoided thinking about it, throwing himself off that train of thought on purpose as soon as it popped into the station. He didn't want to think about the very real possibility that his grief was making him hallucinate.
He knew he wasn't okay, that was for sure, but he didn't know if he could take it if he really did go around the bend.
He must have drifted off, pen still in hand, because the next thing he knew he was startling awake from another nightmare, sweaty and shaky. That in itself was not peculiar.
What had awoken him, was.
John heard the whispers of that voice, that baritone voice so sorely missed and depressingly almost forgotten, echoing in his ears even as he walked briskly home, head down and left hand trembling in his jacket pocket.
I'm sorry, John.
–––
The third time it happened, John was taking a walk in the park.
Unfortunately, today was not a good day.
He stared down at the ground, kicking stones absently as he strode along the path in the dark. It was two in the morning, and John couldn't sleep. He hadn't even tried to because he knew himself – he knew that he was in such a dark mood tonight that if he got that bottle of sleeping pills out, he would just go right ahead and down the whole thing without a second thought.
He'd been surreptitiously eyeing the drawer that held his gun the whole night, too.
No, instead of downing those blasted pills or taking the gun to his head and finally ending all of this once and for all as strong as the temptation was, he'd gone for a walk.
Some cynical part of him was sneering that if he was mugged at least it wouldn't be as shameful a way to go.
He hated this. This confliction. If only he could snap out of this indecisive state and just make a choice already.
Later, John wouldn't be able to say what exactly had made him look up. When he did, though, he stopped in his tracks at the sight before him.
There was a man standing there in a circle of orange–gold light cast by a streetlamp. He was tall, stupidly tall, and wore a long coat. John could see his sharp, defined profile, even from this distance – his hair was a shock of black curls almost hanging over a face so pale it looked a little ghostly in the orange light. John didn't know how he could tell really, but the man exuded self–importance and quick–silver, transcendental brilliance.
Just as he always had before, he took John's breath away.
But no, this wasn't right. Sherlock was dead, damn it. John kept hearing him and now, apparently, seeing him everywhere. He remembered him, but it wasn't the real him. John was afraid that soon he'd start to forget the real thing and that all the memories he had would fade into nothing. Sherlock would be no more, like that incredible mind and cool arrogance and sulking child had never existed in the first place. Then all John would have would be this, this ghost.
He didn't want to forget. He didn't want his memories of Sherlock to be replaced with lies conjured up by his grief–stricken mind. It would be like losing him all over again.
Wrong, wrong, this was all wrong.
John felt his eyes tear up against his will, and he looked down, clapping a hand over his mouth to stifle a wrenching, traitorous sob.
When he looked up a mere thirty seconds later, the ghost was gone.
–––
John thought he was going crazy, but by now he had stopped caring about that.
He figured that if he saw Sherlock around occasionally because of – whatever the hell was happening with him, was that really such a bad thing? Was it really so bad that sometimes it felt like his best friend was still alive and still here with him, next to him, watching him with those blinding, piercing blue–grey–hazel eyes? Was it so bad that because of that, John didn't feel so alone and lost all the time?
He didn't dare hope. That would have been utterly foolish, but something in him wasn't hurting quite so much anymore.
He was having less of those bad days.
–––
It kept happening, for many more months. He would catch glimpses of a ghost, see things, hear things, and even smell things like tobacco and mint and sandalwood.
This was all so wrong – no, inappropriate, but so wonderful too. It was full to the brim with meaning and colour and life, and it reminded John so very much of his short time (too short) with a madman.
John dared not hope, but he waded through his days, blundered on and kept on existing, like it was true.
Anyone else would have lost their mind, in John's position. In fact, John had thought he would eventually. Seeing echoes of your deceased beloved everywhere? Yeah, it would have driven anyone half–sane completely mad. John already had plenty of screws loose though, so what was one more?
He flat–out refused to think about how it felt like all of his true, treasured memories were blotting out, losing colour like photographs burning away in the fireplace of time.
–––
There were times when he was lying in bed and just before drifting off to sleep, he would hear a rustle in the dark, like someone moving around. He would feel a warm draught on his face, like a breath, and it would taste like something sweet, something that curiously reminded John of honey.
John would open his eyes and he would be there, standing at the end of his bed. John would sit up and stare, but would make no move to reach out. He would say not a word, fearful of breaking this fragile, perfect, completely impossible moment.
They would remain there, both of them absolutely still, suspended in some kind of alternate reality. John refused to let himself think in these moments, refused to let himself dwell on his regrets. Instead, he would hungrily drink in the sight of the best thing that had ever happened to him, his everything come back to him. Those were the times he fell easily, mercifully, into a dreamless asleep.
But he always woke up alone.
–––
When people say that 'time heals wounds' or 'give it time, it'll get better', there are some cases where that's simply, completely and utterly wrong. Just like there tend to be exceptions to every rule.
John's case was one of those.
He had basically turned into his sister, and he hated that.
But not more than he hated himself.
–––
John didn't believe it. No, that wasn't true. He didn't want to believe it, but he did. He knew it was irrational and dangerous but at the same it just – made sense, and he really believed it.
But by God he was terrified now. Not because he thought he was losing his hold on reality, because that had happened a long time ago and he had come to terms with the fact.
He was terrified of what would happen to him if this stopped happening, if he stopped seeing things.
He seriously doubted he could survive losing Sherlock a second time.
–––
"John, come now. Listen to reason. You'll end up killing yourself at this rate."
John stared absently, emotionlessly, back into cold, calculating, completely uncaring eyes.
"Well it's not like you actually care," John replied, all false nonchalance.
After all, he was talking to the one who had practically handed his little brother over to Satan's offspring for the greater good. Thus, this was the one person John was completely unashamed to share his true thoughts with. Some petulant part of him was determined to make this block of ice crack under the weight of guilt and grief that he surely beared.
Seemed it wouldn't happen today, though. Mycroft stared back at him unblinkingly, tapping his umbrella against the floor. The man that was the British Government was seated in Sherlock's chair, and this felt intrinsically, terribly wrong to John.
"And what about Sherlock? Do you honestly think he would have wanted this for you?" Mycroft spoke tonelessly, his tone lilting without any accompanying sentiment.
John glared venom and hatred at the elder Holmes.
"He would not have liked seeing you like this. My brother cared about you very –"
"Don't," John snapped harshly, military man leaking through once more, "Don't you dare. You have no right to say anything like that to me. Not after everything – everything you did."
Mycroft sighed heavily.
The heavy silence of both of their losses eventually drove Mycroft to leave, a quiet "I'm sorry, John" placed precariously behind him as he left. John turned away from the words.
–––
His life didn't get better, not really.
There were the days that he would be bored out of his mind, and days where he didn't see/hear/smell/feel/taste anything, days where he felt numb and cold and everything was grey.
But the hallucinations (no point denying what they were) made it easier.
They helped, but at the same time, John still knew that all of it was just a figment of his imagination. A coping mechanism, nothing more. None of it was actually real – Sherlock, his Sherlock, was still dead.
And a coping mechanism was temporary. It would go away eventually, probably when John was finally at peace with it all.
Then again, he didn't think that would be happening anytime soon.
That was something at least.
–––
In the beginning, people had made an effort with him. They'd 'dropped by' and left stupid things like casseroles for him and Mrs Hudson. John never did understand why people did that. Gave casseroles to the grieving.
It's not like they could finish them all between the two of them. Mrs Hudson didn't even like casseroles, and John hadn't been eating much lately.
Lestrade came around asking his opinion about a case, Molly left flowers supposedly for no reason, even Sarah came by every once in a while to say hello.
So yes, they tried, but John wasn't fooled. They came around and under the poor guise of making idle chat to catch up, checked up on him to make sure he wasn't about to off himself.
John wasn't Sherlock Holmes when it came to acting, but he was good by average standards. He didn't smile, but he conversed with them relatively normally. He put up a stoic mask of indifference, a blank slate, and they seemed to take his seemingly stable mental state at face value. After a couple of months, he had them convinced that he'd be fine. So they left him alone, free to do as he pleased.
Which was exactly what he wanted.
Just in case, you understand.
–––
One and half years passed.
It was all one big blur to John, seeing as he'd turned into his sister. He wasn't addicted, but he supposed that with his track record it was only a matter of time.
He'd be ashamed, but he'd stopped caring about such trivial things like self–respect a while back.
When he stumbled into the flat late one night – just another regular night – completely wasted, it was to find Sherlock's ghost standing with his back to him by the window, violin held with perfect poise by his shoulder. He wasn't playing.
John smiled at the sight.
His mind always conjured up much clearer, more accurate sights and sounds when he was smashed.
Sherlock turned to face him, giving his usual one–worded greeting.
"John," he said shortly, apprehensively.
"Sherlock," John grinned back happily.
A foreign emotion flashed across Sherlock's face and in John's intoxicated state, it took a while to recognise exactly what it was. But recognise it he did:
Utter bafflement.
John's grin widened. That was a new one. These hallucinations were getting better and better.
"So how's life?" John giggled, finding the irony highly amusing.
Today had been a pretty good day, after all. He'd had just the right amount to drink and was floating on a cloud of bliss, especially with another ghostly visit on top of things.
Sherlock's mouth actually dropped open at that, but he recovered quickly, "You're inebriated."
"Oh, you're on fire tonight. How'd you know?" John deadpanned.
John saw the exact moment when everything clicked into place in the ghost's mind.
"Ah. I see. You've been hallucinating, and you think I'm another apparition."
"No, silly. I know you're another apparition. But that's okay, it's not like you can fix that. I'm fine with it, really," John's smile wavered a bit.
He turned to go into the kitchen. Maybe he hadn't had enough after all.
Sherlock followed him.
"John. John, wait."
John turned and looked at him through bleary eyes, "Yeah?"
Sherlock's face was doing something weird. Something not like him at all.
He actually looked genuinely distressed.
John tilted his head in confusion. Usually it was John who was the distressed one. Usually, Sherlock would just stand or sit there, plucking at his violin or conducting an experiment or sulking on the couch and John would be the one smashing things and yelling things and craving … something, anything.
But tonight, Sherlock looked like the one who could use a little of that something, anything.
"Are you alright?" John asked quizzically, before he caught himself.
He shook his head in disbelief at himself.
"God. I'm asking a figment if they're okay. Now I know I need another drink."
Sherlock's cheek twitched. On anyone else it would have been a violent flinch.
"John, no. Just – look at me, really look. I'm real," Sherlock's eyes were wide and … not exactly desperate, but close to it.
John just blinked at him, "Okay. That's nice."
Something inside Sherlock was breaking. This wasn't his area, not at all – but he knew that he'd seriously hurt John in leaving like that. He'd done it knowing that John would be upset of course, but he hadn't known it would do this much damage. He'd thought John would move on.
He'd known John cared about him, but God. He hadn't known just how much.
He hadn't known how mutual those feelings really were.
He could see it now though, clear as a bell. He searched John's eyes, silently imploring that John see the truth of his best friend's return. Silently imploring that he see Sherlock was alive and kicking and right in front of him.
But still John's eyes remained hollow, completely devoid of the steel and kindness that had once been the army doctor.
John gave Sherlock a ghost of a smile and turned to make himself a drink.
Sherlock mind screamed in protest at how wrong this was. Where was that wonderful smile, that John smile that he loved? He hadn't been in England, in London, in 221B in one and a half years. He hadn't been home, where John was, in so long and this wasn't right.
Something inside Sherlock snapped, then.
John had reached up into the overhead cupboards to grab a glass, but before he could set it on the table, he found himself enveloped in spindly arms, his nose pressed to Sherlock's sternum, long fingers carding through his hair.
John's whole world stopped.
Not once in one and a half years had Sherlock's ghost touched him.
Not once.
Not once.
Realisation hit him like a truck.
John felt like his insides were being crushed. He felt as if the air in his lungs wasn't sufficient enough to keep him functioning. He felt like his blood was running too hot and too cold and too fast.
He felt like he would fall into a million pieces if Sherlock – God, this is Sherlock, it's really him – let him go.
He became aware that the detective was breathing his name and sorry into his hair, holding him tighter still as they tried to save one another yet again, as they prepared themselves to put each other back together again so that they could fix them.
John clutched Sherlock to him, shaking as he fell into a million pieces.
Just like the whiskey glass.