Author's note: Thank you for all the wonderful reviews and follows and favouriting! I started this fic, being my first, not knowing if anyone would like it. Thank you for being so kind and constructive!
22nd Sep 2012: I came back to rewrite this as some bits were not written very well. So this is the final product. I would be rewriting the rest of the chapters soon and posting the sixth chapter. Cheers.

John Watson stood in front of the grave of his best friend. Sherlock Holmes, the one man who gave him everything when he was discharged from his duties in Iraq and took it all away when he chose to step off the roof of St. Bart's. This was the third time he had been here this week. He kept this visits a secret from his therapist after the sixth month.

Two more days, and it would be a year now. A year since The Fall. John could not think about it in any other way. He couldn't call it The Day My Best Friend Killed Himself Right In Front Of My Eyes, could he? It has almost been a year now, and he still could not bring himself back to Baker Street. He could not bear to look at the rooms that once contained (just barely) a man who had a mind faster than anyone he knew, the man who composed complicated scores when he tried to think, the man who lounged about in his dressing gown and stored human appendages next to the milk. John did not want to feel the emptiness of the apartment that would never again hold the life and frenzied energy that was his friend.

John was a man of science, he knew what he saw, he knew that his friend was dead. But somehow, at the back of his mind, no matter how convincing the evidence was, he could not stop the glimmer of hope that arose during the darkest of nights, the hope that Sherlock, that brilliant man, could be alive. And sometimes he thinks that this ridiculous hope was affecting his psyche. He began seeing figures on street corners.

The doctor resigned himself to the fact that he might be going clinically insane. He hope to hell he wasn't, but it is quite hard to argue against the fact that he was seeing a dead person all over London, and that had been happening frequently over the past two months now. He remembered the first time he happened. He had just left his studio apartment, the one Mycroft very generously provided. And was about to cross the road to the library, where he now spends most of his time reading and trying to not remember how Sherlock looked on the pavement outside St Bart's. That was when a familiar figure crossed the corner of his peripheral vision. The thermos of hot tea he was holding slipped through his fingers, hitting the ground and scalded his legs with the contents. By the time he looked up, the figure had disappeared.

John had decided, upon the advice from his therapist, Leia, that the best course of action was for him to get his life together by forming closure on Sherlock's death. He was advised to clear out his things from 221B Baker Street and to move on once and for all. John was hesitant. He felt like he was betraying Sherlock, even though he was no longer supposed to, logically. But when he thought about how he had spent the past eleven months like one of the walking dead, he could not deny that something had to be done. He decided, then, that he would pick up the few possessions he had left in Baker Street and pack the rest into boxes and send them to Mycroft Holmes.

The latter had been strangely quiet of late, instead of being overbearingly concerned like he had been the first six months after, he almost stopped all voluntary communication with John.

Finally, a week later, the day had come for him to pack up what was left in the flat at Baker Street and move on. It was no coincidence that it was also exactly one year after The Fall. John wanted to grieve for his fallen friend one last time, maybe have a good cry and then a cup of tea with Mrs Hudson, who had been nothing but kind to John.

So he trudged up the stairs, the sound of his cane hitting the wooden steps, each step reminding him why he was limping again. John laid his hand on the doorknob and turned. He was greeted with the sight of what it was a year before, it was as if Sherlock would come bustling in any minute. Other than the hazardous liquids that used to be boiling on the bunsen burners, everything was the same. Sherlock's violin was lying in its open case, as if waiting for its owner to come by and pick it up any time. All of Sherlock's scientific equipment still scattered the countertop in the kitchen.

John walked over to the mantelpiece and picked up the skull. The skull that John replaced when he moved in. He noticed, distractedly, that there was no dust on the mantelpiece, in fact, there was no dust on any of the furniture. Mycroft's work. He thought. It was as if time had stopped in the flat for the year, just waiting for Sherlock to shout for tea from the kitchen. John went to sit on the sofa and closed his eyes, remembering 221B, and his mad flatmate, for he wanted to be the last time.

John remembered the first time he entered the apartment with all its eccentricities. He remembered the "neatening up" that Sherlock tried to do during that first visit. He remembered sitting at the armchair near the fireplace, blogging about the cases that they solved, with his friend leaning over sometimes to check on what he was placing onto the site. He remembered the sofa he was sitting on, the one Sherlock often sprawled on while on a case. He would lay there for hours, fingers steepled and being perfectly still, staring off into space, going into his mind palace. Sometimes John thought that he could hear his friend's brain working, just like a hard disk, whirring away while evidence or information was processed.

Then John allowed himself, just a moment, to think about things he should have said to Sherlock. He thought about the feelings he had discovered he had, only too late.

To be continued