Written for the song/prompt: "…to ask you why you left me here behind."
I tried to be happy. I really did. I knew he would have wanted me to be, however much he seemed as though he did not. I smiled and said I was alright to everyone who asked. Even to Mary, sweet Mary, who tried everything she could, I lied.
It was not only the adventures I shared with him that I missed so dearly, although my explorer's soul grew restless at such a homely life. It was him, his eccentric brilliance, his brash yet calculating temper, and his somehow endearing perverseness. It was my dearest of dear friends, and the carefree – well, almost – life I had with him that I missed.
My dreams were of once more climbing the steps of Baker Street to his summons, even were it in the middle of the night, and of walking in to another of his energetic moods. I wished for any trace of him at all – for him to be alive, wherever, however.
I visited our old lodgings, sometimes. Mrs. Hudson had kept it as they were when he was still here. I wished more than anything for him to storm into my house in the small hours of the night and demand my assistance. I never said as much to my darling Mary, for it would have hurt her so, but in some lonely moments, when I caught myself staring blankly at his silver cigarette case, I yearned for it again.
I thought we had our whole lives. I thought we had all the time in the world to go running all over England for our cases. But that is the way of the young; they never think of growing old, and now I had to grow old without him in my life.
Most of the time, I was content. I had a good career, I had a good income, I had a good house, and I had a wonderful wife who did everything she could to make me happy, and I to make her happy. And yet, in those moments when something eccentric or queer came up – a case, perhaps, in the newspaper – I turned and grabbed my hat to go and see him about it, only to realize he would never be there to answer my call.
He was gone now.
He had his peace. Never again would his busy mind want so much for stimulation that it would risk itself for that. But what about mine?
Sometimes I was angry with him. For leaving, for having no thought as to how I would fare without him. Perhaps he really cared so little for me and for his own life as to throw it away. He was only thirty-seven, for God's sake…
And now he would never grow older, not that bloodied body at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls.
I wanted to drag him back to life and demand why, why had he died? I still had need of him, and while I felt selfish for disturbing him so, sometimes I found myself, at whatever lonely times thoughts of him caught me, starting a letter to him. Oh, I was not deluding myself; I knew he was dead, dead, dead…
There, I said it.
He was dead.
How I wished it were not so! How I wished I could climb the seventeen stairs to our flat at Baker Street and find him there happily perusing some case or monograph, lost in his mind and his world. However lost he was to me, I prayed multiple times that he was not dead. That he had somehow miraculously survived those treacherous falls.
Then Mary died.
Surprising to most, I shed no tears. Lestrade, however, good old Lestrade, knew why.
I had internalised my grief, let myself become the bottle for my own tears. I would have wept for them, for my Mary and my friend, but I could not. The tears sprang to my eyes when I looked at the golden wedding ring, or at the silver cigarette case, but they would not come down.
They couldn't.
At least with Mary I had had the chance to say goodbye, though I still had fits of anger with her. Why did she leave me when she knew he had as well? Why did both of the dearest people in the world to me have to go when I needed them the most? The best cure for me would have been to break down and weep, but there was a physical barrier, and that cure was kept from me.
But I was angry mostly with him. He had left me – why had he left? I understood the logical reasons, I knew why – and yet my heart wanted something more from the deceased detective: a farewell.
He had not even waited long enough for me to tell him how much I loved him.
At least Mary had lingered long enough for that. But now he was gone, and I would have to write my love away to a blank sheet of paper, in only memory of the sparking grey eyes. More than once I considered taking my own life, for what was there to live for? But then I would see a suddenly sharp gaze from a beautiful face, or an expression I had come to know as disappointment from the aquiline one.
And I would scream at them: Why? Why did you leave if you wanted me to live?
Yet the revolver remained unused, if very clean. I could not disappoint both of them. I loved them too much.
I dressed in black, mourning for both my wife and my dearest friend. I missed them, the void in my soul created by their absence never to be filled. Gentle Mary's, at least, quieted when I remembered her comfort, her love that made me feel at home. But for his, it was forever aching, even when I remembered the few glimmers of the slight tenderness towards me that passed for love from him.
Mary was my home, and he was my adventure, for want of better words. I miss them both terribly. Wherever you are, in heaven or in hell, I send my love to both of you.
To the kindest and most spirited woman in the world, Mary Watson, nee Morstan.
And to the best and the wisest man I have ever known, Sherlock Holmes.