Those words… those words, those blasted words.
Sitting, balancing, clinging at the tip of his tongue; they swirled in his mind, bouncing furiously like a rubber ball, thudding against every surface of the inside of his skull.
He saw the way John looked at him.
Words. Hundreds of thousands of million words left to be said, and these were his last.
Blink.
The words hummed like a hive of bees in his head, hesitating at his lips, wishing nothing more than to jump out into the abyss of the world. John.
The words were consuming him, burning like a wildfire as they have been since that spark when they met, threatening to swallow him whole.
John.
Such a fragile state was he; sloppily glued at the seams; held together by little more than adhesive formed by hardheadedness and willpower; a will that was quickly fading and a mind beginning to soften.
Those words… in that moment, Sherlock realized what those final words would do.
He would shatter. Simply shatter.
Into a million pieces, the man before him would break. He would crumble and cease to be. Gone with a wisp of the wind. Gone.
If he spoke, John would be destroyed, unable to cope, to move on. Live.
But left unvoiced, they would consume the consulting detective.
He swallowed the fire.
"Sherlock's actually a girl's name…"
These lies; so foreign on his lips, poured out like poison.
For the words he wished so desperately to speak would simply break John.
And so he shall burn. As the aircraft left the ground, the flames melted him to the core, his soul a molten pool of agony, for John must never know.
Those words. Those three words, drifted off the smoldering wreckage that was once the Great Sherlock Holmes.