So Reichenbach gave me all the feels in the book and this is my response to it.
Having recently lost someone I care about, I can honestly say that I kind of know how John's feeling. I too have nightmares, have trouble thinking about them.
Anyway.
Give it a read, please thanks. :) I don't own it, obviously.
The graffiti started the week after he fell.
Can barely think his name, let alone say it just say he and him and his.
Despite it beginning so soon after his death, it wasn't until six months later that John Watson actually began to notice things.
His limp had returned in full-force, as well as his shaking hand, and he did little more than drift through his days. It was as if he'd come back from Afghanistan all over again, having been sent home and being forced back into regular society, as if it was actually possible, he drifted and he limped and he went to Therapy and visited His grave. He did not leave Baker street, found the prospect rather terrifying, instead he moved His things all into His room and got another job to pay the rent. It kept his mind busy and he was able to at the very least not think about how things had been just a few short months ago.
But the graffiti.
He'd stumbled upon it entirely by accident, one day- on the back of a large truck someone had painted 'I BELIEVE IN SHERLOCK' in a vivid shade of orange.
He stood boggling at the message for a few moments before the truck pulled away, and he nearly dashed after it, only jerking forward a few feet before his limp sent a shock of pain up his thigh and he stopped.
There's not any real pain though, it's all in your mind. A cocky voice in his head echoed.
Alerted to this bizarre phenomenon, he began to notice more and more cropping up. Sometimes it was just scraps of paper taped onto bus windows, or scrawled on sign posts, or posters on corkboards; they all read similar messages.
I BELIEVE IN SHERLOCK.
MORIARTY WAS REAL.
RICHARD BROOK IS A FRAUD.
NO DOUBT SHERLOCK.
THE STORY TELLER ONLY TOLD STORIES.
I BELIEVE IN SHERLOCK HOLMES.
They were everywhere, painted on the sides of buildings, scribbled on the front of notebooks, in the margins of letters on stop signs, they were all over the place. He wanted to ask someone about them, but so many people believed Moriarty and the news... He just wasn't quite sure who or where to go to to get answers on the matter. So he continued to limp through lift with an unsteady hand and read the messages splattered across London like(blood on the pavement)rain on the window.
He was leaving the clinic, later than usual to do some paperwork, when he finally got his answer. He'd been searching for a cab when something caught his attention. He could smell spray paint, hear the shaking of the can in a nearby alley. He'd turned, and there she'd been; a scrawny looked woman in her early twenties, hair spiked in the back, spraying the words he'd grown so accustomed to seeing.
I BELIEVE IN SHER
He abandoned the search for a cab and instead hobbled up behind her.
"Excuse me- excuse me, you there!"
He surprised her so badly she almost emptied her can on him, but when she'd calmed down it was her who started asking him questions.
"Hold on, I recognize you! You're John Watson! I read your blog! Why haven't you updated?"
"Er, well that's sort of what I wanted to ask you about, actually. What, um, what is this?"
"What, the tag? Oh- you haven't seen it?"
"Well no, that's sort of why I'm asking."
And that was how he ended up in a late-night cafe with twenty-two year old Joan ("Call me Joanie, everybody does!") Stratton sipping coffee while she talked around a mince pie.
"It's not just messages, it's an entire online community. You've got fans, Dr. Watson, and not everybody believes that Richard Brooks bloke." she'd said.
"Well, yeah I figured that much- what I don't understand is why, or-or how I mean, when did people start putting those messages all over the city?"
"Months ago! Right after- oh, I'm really sorry, by the way, I'm such an absolute arse." she frowned. "He was a great man, that Sherlock."
John had felt his throat go tight. "Yes. Yes he was." was all he managed to mutter.
"Erm, right. Well, it sort of started how anything else starts- somebody didn't agree with the media." she grinned. "Sherlock Holmes caught my father's killer. I watched first hand the crazy things he noticed and figured out and- I just knew it couldn't be true, that he faked all that." her face went somber. "So I talked about it on my own blog, and it sort of... spiralled from there. People he'd helped got together, posted all their individual stories, and other people started to believe it. There's a whole forum now, folks talking and getting together... I didn't think it'd go out of control with tagging things, but... I mean I can't say it doesn't do my heart good."
They'd sat and talked a while longer, exchanged emails, and John made a vague promise that he'd try and get around to updating his blog as they called separate cabs and departed. He never saw her again, but the tags continued to crop up, and he began frequenting the forum.
People not only believed Him, John came to find.
People believed Sherlock lived.
He'd had to put the laptop away when he found that particular message board, it made him sick that people entertained the thought, but something kept drawing him back to it.
SIGHTINGS OF HOLMES
I THINK I SAW HIM ON THE TUBE TODAY
DOES THIS PICTURE LOOK LIKE HIM?
THEORIES AND SUGGESTIONS ON HOW HE SURVIVED
Some of the comments made him sick, others were so well thought-out he thought Sherlock would have gotten quite the kick out of it.
And as the days rolled by he found he did not have quite as tough of a time thinking Sherlock's name.
John visited the grave again, spoke to his friend at length about things. He met up with Molly for tea a few times, left the flat a bit more often, updated his blog. (Nothing interesting, he couldn't write about Sherlock yet, possibly never again.)
Before he knew it, a year had passed and it was growing closer and closer to a second year without his friend.
A second year without Sherlock.
A second year with milk in his fridge and no body parts. A second year without bullet holes in the wall and knife marks on the kitchen table, a second year without that cocky, self-assured smirk and nicotine patch-covered arm. A second year of drifting and limping and surviving.
He met up with Molly more the start of the second year, and she seemed extra-thoughtful, as if something was weighing heavily on her mind. She made more of an effort to keep in contact with him, and around the holidays it was him and Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson at Molly's flat. She sent them emails and texts and invited them out, as if she were desperately attempting to keep up-to-date on their lives. John had never been close with Molly, but he found she was rather helpful in distracting his mind from obvious things.
The night terrors got worse in the second year, and he slept less, spent more time on the couch reading than anything else. Anything to distract his mind, to escape the mind-numbing, all encompassing boredom of every day life.
Then he realized that must have been how Sherlock felt whenever cases weren't cropping up like he wanted.
Then it hit him.
Here he was, lying around the flat with Mrs. Hudson shooting worried glances at him, sending vague responses to Molly, and just... wasting away like he had been before he met Sherlock. Outside in the city, there were people who believed and they were writing the message across the brickwork and the pavement and screaming out that they knew the truth, that they believed, that they were on Sherlock's side- that they were on his side.
The following morning, he paid a visit to Greg Lestrade, and offered his help, if he wanted it at all, on any cases he had trouble with. You never know, after all, an outside eye might be useful.
Something in the air had evened out then, and the limp wasn't -quite- so bad, and he could go without his cane some days. He started taking Molly up on her offers for tea and it became a Sunday ritual of tea at Molly's while they watched old episodes of Flying Circus. Sometimes Lestrade calls him in to check out a case, and Donovan shoots him -looks- and Anderson mutters under his breath but being back on a crime scene fills a sliver of the void in his life, and he thinks that if Sherlock taught him anything it's that John might just be as messed up at Sherlock is- was because he can't be away from the war.
He has tried, and he cannot.
He visits Sherlock's grave and finds that people have left messages.
Notes, mostly, a few bunches of flowers.
Sentiment.
The notes he doesn't read, because he knows exactly what they all say- that Sherlock is believed in.
Sometimes, when he visits, he thinks he sees a tall, thin shadow at the treeline, but when he tries to focus on it it's not there.
We believe what we want to believe.
He updates his blog a bit more, nothing other than inane drivel about every day life and some notes about cases he's helped Lestrade with.
The second year ends at Molly's flat once more, with a glass of wine and pretty good company. The only out of the ordinary thing is that Molly is texting someone periodically all night, and John can't help but notice that Molly has gifts under her tree from her parents, meaning she's already visited them that Christmas day, so who is she texting?
She looks close to tears at one point and then puts the phone down and they toast to a better year than this one.
The start of the third year is the weirdest because Lestrade calls him more often, and sometimes he gets texts from Mycroft asking him how he is. He doesn't answer Mycroft's messages, but then he feels sort of bad, because Mycroft may have had a hand in it, but he lost a brother all the same.
So he replies that he's fine.
Mycroft apologizes.
John says it's fine.
Mycroft doesn't text him again.
The only peace and quiet I will allow is from my dear brother.
The third year begins with a murder.
Lestrade phones John and requests his opinion. The man was found in a dingy little apartment with a sniper rifle and filled with surveillance cameras that watched street corners.
Street corners near Baker Street.
He's been dead at least a week, if not longer, and John works with Molly in the morgue- the body has a single bullet in the chest, straight through the heart. It's a precision shot, John can tell, measured and calculated to hit perfect.
Why was he watching Baker street? Who was he? What on earth had he been up to? He'd had no cell phone on him, no computer, nothing. His wallet and fridge had been emptied, and his room had been ripped apart. No sign of forced entry, no broken windows, no anything. No fingerprints besides the victim's, no clues, no DNA.
It was as if a ghost had come in, shot the man, and then raided his fridge.
The case went cold, but John blogged about it anyway, and he received a flood of visitors to his site, thrilled that Dr. Watson was talking about cases again, instead of how irritated he was by reckless cab drivers.
For a few weeks the nightmares stay away, but when things settle down again, they return in full force, this time filled with tall, slender phantoms with pale eyes and pin-point pupils that are sliced horizontally with blood.
Sleeping is so hard anymore. It get so bad that in his sleep-deprived delirium he sends Sherlock texts. Largely nothing interesting, dumb updates on his day to day, sometimes he asks him to pick up something at the market and when he comes home to find that nothing has been put in the kitchen, he smirks.
It's a little like old times.
Once, he woke up thrashing, the image of Sherlock's death-pale face with lines of blood and those wide, empty grey eyes staring at him. He was shaking so badly when he tried to go to the kitchen for a glass of water he ended up huddled on the floor hiccuping and trying to breathe through the panic attack. He sends Sherlock a single text that night.
I hate you so much for this.-JW
And he's so tired and so sleep deprived that he falls asleep right there and when he wakes up, he's back in his bed with the blanket wrapped tight around him.
The event is so surreal and bizarre that he writes the entire thing off as a dream.
But you sent the message, that message was sent, and you were on the floor. Obvious!
The forum he found through Joanie Stratton has quieted in the last year, some adamant believers continue to post pictures and exchange theories, but for the most part, people have forgotten. People are fickle like that, he figures. Just like the media, they forget some things and remember others.
So he stops visiting the forums, and he stops going to his Therapist. She wants him to distance himself from anything having to do with murder cases, with danger and mystery.
What she doesn't get, what she doesn't understand is that it's the only thing that makes him feel alive anymore.
So he stops going and instead once a week he visits Sherlock's grave, leans himself against the tree that shining black stone rests under, and talks. He talks about his blog, about how much he misses getting dragged around London with a high-functioning Sociopath, and how he actually, legitimately misses finding weird dead things in the fridge because at least that meant that Sherlock was there.
At least it meant he was alive.
He tells Sherlock that Mrs. Hudson's been seeing someone, and that despite her insistance that she is not the house keeper, he still comes home sometimes and she's dusted or done things around the flat. He tells a joke he heard in passing once, and nobody laughs.
Sometimes, he gets calls from Lestrade, and those are his best days, because for a little while, just a few minutes at best, he can pretend he has found a case interesting enough, weird enough, tough enough... that Sherlock bloody Holmes will pop out of his grave and announce that being dead was boring.
But he doesn't.
Just for me, stop it, just, stop this.
It'd be a funny thing, if Sherlock started listening to him Sherlock didn't listen to anyone other than himself in life, so why would he listen to John in death? It'd be very not-like Sherlock, but then again... Sherlock always managed to surprise him.
He figured, as the third year waned, that if Sherlock had wanted to surprise him, he would have done it three years ago.
Sherlock Holmes has seen John Watson approximately three times in the last three years. Once, at his own grave, imploring him to not be dead. The second time is shortly after he has located and taken out the man watching Baker street, watching John arrive and be greeted by Lestrade.
Sees him limp into the building from where he is hidden on the rooftops.
If it was partially psychosomatic then it's completely psychological now.
And the third... The third time was something he could not help himself with. He has been regularly receiving texts from John, but he has never answered them. A quick glance and delete. He is on a case and he cannot be distracted, no matter how much he would like to return to John Watson's side and tell him he is stupid.
The third time, he reads the text and travels an hour back to Baker street to see John curled up on the floor, shivering in his sleep with his mobile clutched loose between his fingers. He eased him into bed, threw the blanket around him, and returned to his mission.
He had risked a lot, doing that one simple thing. But it had been two and almost a half years and he's not so blind to sentiment to understand that John is worse off now than he was when they met.
He returned from war, got a taste of the world Sherlock lived in, and had it ripped from him.
Several days later, he is certain he has found and eradicated the last of Moriarty's threads- but he still cannot return.
He must be one hundred percent positive that no one is in danger.
No. Sherlock Holmes may not be great friends with Sentiment, but he has known it for more than five minutes, and therefore he knows it well enough.
It is late November, when he finally believes he can go back. He arrives at Baker street late in the evening, and lets himself in, of course. He stands in front of the door to their flat for quite a few minutes, trying to think of the right greeting.
He cannot figure out how John is going to react. Certainly not well, given what Molly has told him in the last few years. He has kept in regular contact with her; she has updated him best she can on the three people he killed himself to protect, and he is, quite frankly, eternally grateful to the woman who helped him fake his death.
But there is so much he has to tell John, and Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson that he doesn't even know where to begin. Sherlock Holmes, genius, consulting detective, never forgets, the man who notices and deduces... has zero idea about how to approach human beings.
Every idea he gets ends in something unpleasant, so he scraps each one and stands looking at the door for even longer. Eventually, he gives up.
And he does the only thing he can think of.
He opens the door and walks right in.
Sherlock Holmes does not even get the chance to say he can explain before he is suddenly back in the hallway with blood spurting out his nose. The door slams and locks and all Sherlock can think is that it actually went better than it could have.
He unlocks the door and goes inside and John has disappeared from the sitting room, into his room, Sherlock knows. He follows, using his gloved hand to staunch the blood flow.
The sound of footsteps tells him that John has barricaded himself in his room, not what Sherlock had expected from a seasoned military man, but still not the worst thing to come out of today. His return. His resurrection. Christ waited three days before he returned, and Sherlock Holmes waited three long and tedious years. He wastes a few seconds making sure his nose is not broken, and it's not, and Irene Adler's words come to the fore front of his mind.
Somebody loves you. If I had to punch that face I'd avoid your nose and your teeth too.
John Watson most certainly does not love Sherlock Holmes right now, but he still did not put enough force behind the punch to break his nose, as Sherlock knows he could have.
Things are going rather well still.
He stands himself outside John's door, on the side of the knob so that if it slams open he doesn't get another injury, and swiftly, carefully begins to explain.
It takes John Watson, head between his knees and having a mild panic attack, about fourteen minutes to decide to open his bedroom door and actually take a look at this man claiming to be his closest friend back from the grave. He almost doesn't. He almost calls the police to get this madman out of his flat. His eyes are burning, but he's woken up crying to night terrors enough times where he refuses to actually let any tears fall.
But in the end, his desperation that maybe, maybe his whispered request for a miracle three years ago has come true. He opens the door.
His hair is longer than it was, dirtier, he's thinner as well, and his skin has gone down several shades whiter. He looks a bit like a wraith; all long delicate lines and cheekbones and wide staring grey eyes of a man who has been without something very important for a long time. His coat is ragged, there's blood on his face from the punch John gave him, and he looks... He looks tired, sapped of that nervous, arrogant energy that so thrilled John three years ago.
"Three years," he manages to croak. "Three... bloody years, Sherlock. No message, no note, no text, no nothing."
"Necessary. Couldn't let them think I was alive."
"Couldn't let me know?"
"They would have killed you. Killed Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson. It was my only choice."
It is the most tense moment of both their lives, waiting to see what John does. John doesn't even know what he's going to do, he just stands there in his doorway, clad in his pajamas and looking at this stupid, arrogant, incredibly massive pain in his arse. He notes down everything he can about Sherlock's physical appearance, because he knows Sherlock is doing the same to him right now. He knows that Sherlock is seeing what John has been avoiding looking at, that the lines on his face have grown deeper, that his eyes are shimmering and bloodshot, that the bags under his eyes are massive and colored dark blueish purple. He looks patchy and ill and utterly, completely alone.
John swallows, and notices that Sherlock looks just as alone as he is.
Sherlock flinches when John takes the several steps forward to fling his arms tight around Sherlock's shoulders and just- just grip his back in the tightest, most desperate hug he's ever given another human being. Three years dead in the ground, and here he stands whole and as bloody annoying as ever. The thought hits him, suddenly, and he starts laughing- a wet, choking laugh that shouldn't be happening because shit this is an intense moment but all he can think of is to laugh because, fucking Sherlock outranks him.
He's a MAJOR pain in the arse.
"I fucking hate you so much, I really do," he bites out through laughter, and the words are angry but there's no true hate behind them.
Sherlock stands stock still, entirely unsure of what to do. He had not thought of this scenario and he doesn't have a clue what to make of it. He almost wants to run the hell away because this is weird even for him.
"You're my best friend."
Neither of them is sure who said it. Maybe it was Sherlock, maybe it was John, maybe they both thought it and assumed the other said it, but it is punctuated by Sherlock's long gangly arms gripping John's shoulders just as tight as John is gripping his.
Sentiment. His own brain chastises.
Obvious. He thinks dryly.