His friends offered countless condolences and offers of support, and from time to time (once a day in coincidental turns) they would show up at his flat and drag him out or just sit with him, offering distraction. But at the end of the day, they all linked back to Sherlock. He had been utterly alone before his chance meeting with Mike Stamford, and then Sherlock had come along and eclipsed all else. Even the ones who had not been introduced to him because of Sherlock – like Sarah – had somehow been tainted by Sherlock's presence. They wanted to offer him distraction, but all they did was remind John of him.
Two weeks after the fall, John returned to 221B. He wasn't intending to stay, that would make his efforts to cleanse his mind and forget much too difficult, but he needed to collect his things and sort some of Sherlock's out and he couldn't expect Mrs Hudson or anybody else to do all of that. The problem was, he walked into the flat and he was assaulted with memories; Mrs Hudson hadn't gotten far in tidying up, not in their living room anyway, and Sherlock was everywhere. The everlasting smile of spray paint and bullet wounds scarring the wall, the dressing gown flung over the sofa, the papers and letters and books and laptop and scorch marks and mug. The memories constricted around John's heart and he could barely breathe, thoughts racing and panicking -
Sherlock was gone. He left. He chose to leave. He chose to leave John. He wouldn't come back. He couldn't come back. Sherlock was gone – forever – and John was left alone and hurting and it was Sherlock's fault.
It bubbled inside him and he couldn't tell if it was rage or grief or both – yes, both, mixing together and acting as catalysts and heating and frothing as the chemicals (emotions) reacted – but he choked out a sobbing yell and threw the first thing of Sherlock's to find its way into his hands with all the force he could muster. He didn't pay attention to whatever it was; there was a thud and a clatter and the familiar sound of bone breaking as the skull of Sherlock's "friend" fell to the floor from the mantelpiece. Distractions. Reminders. John stood, gasping for breath, the rage suddenly leaving him and the grief cooling to ice, staring at it. Its morbid grin faced him, empty eye sockets calling out. A challenge. He could picture the way the vessels and connective tissue and muscles and skin would sit on those stripped bones, ending in a flow of hair from the top. And somehow, in the none-too-imaginative mind of Doctor John Watson, a mere skull transformed itself into the face of his friend.
He shook with a short cough of laughter, almost choking on it. "Well, I say friend..." he muttered, dragging his own muscles and bones and tissues over to the fallen head and, with a hand plagued by his old tremor, reached out to touch the bone. His mental distortion disappeared into cold reality, but he continued, cradling the once important bone structure in his palms and lifting it to look.
The fracture caused by the fall happened to be in the same position as his, despite the shorter distance and softer impact. John's fingertips played over the break and gradually, their shaking stopped for the first time in two weeks. A tight, regretful smile was aimed towards a frozen jaw.
"Thank you, for passing him on to me," John found himself saying, stroking from the temporal to the parietal in random patterns that could have been letters. He paused only briefly, laughing at himself. "God, I must be a wreck if I'm thanking a skull of some guy I never even knew. But... You were all he had, weren't you? I know he wasn't joking, when he said he spoke to you. If you can put up with his bull, I'm sure you can put up with a bit of rambling from a weary old average John," he smiled again. He hadn't found himself able to do this – smile, laugh, talk about the obscenely large elephant that was both there and miles away, six feet under – at all in those two weeks. Absurd, how a skull could be a better influence on his mood than any of his friends.
Subconsciously, he knew why. The skull was a constant silent chanting of Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock, not in the obnoxious and painful shouts that came from everyone he saw but in a deep hum, so familiar; Sherlock's own. Rambling to that bloody skull, which he had threatened to toss out so many times, made him feel better because it made him feel as though Sherlock was still there. His essence absorbed into the smoothed bone, leaking out into John like a nicotine patch – gradual, steady, just about enough. Perhaps it was the knowledge of it keeping Sherlock company and alive through all those years, or perhaps it was John's new additions in the fissions spreading through the right side (so similar that the reminder should sting), but this skull may as well have been the one hidden under the not-gone-yet flesh of the one person John wanted to see. And that comforted him more than anything.
The skull wouldn't fit in the small bag he was using to transport his necessary belongings from 221B to his flat, so John carried it cradled in one arm instead, catching the tube and almost laughing aloud at the reactions it brought. The skull found itself not on a mantelpiece but on John's bedside table, and almost every time he was alone John would begin to talk aloud. And so the once-important mass of bone became important once more, protecting not a brain of its own but all of the weight from John's, the weight he could not possibly burden another living being with (I wish Sherlock was here to hear about this I remember when Sherlock I miss Sherlock God it hurts why would he do this you bastard you idiot most human human being-). His thoughts and fears and memories and, John was sure, it even allowed his tears to run along its contours and in through its eye sockets. Gradually, the skull became Sherlock.
(There were a few short words, however, that John refused to say to a mere fake memory of Sherlock. Even if Sherlock could hear him from the other side of the thin barrier separating life and death, it was much too painful to admit it now, when he could have done so many times before, and receive nothing but a frozen silence in reply.)
In a few years time, unbeknownst to John, the real Sherlock would be perplexed at the disappearance of his precious skull from 221B, then utterly warmed when he found it – in the same position hen as it had been for a long time, overseeing John.
But in the meantime, John may be utterly alone in the world, but he still has a dead man to talk to.