After Sherlock jumped, John left London. He couldn't stand living at Baker Street anymore. He couldn't stand London. He couldn't stand the city's cold grey. It's endlessly weeping skies.
John packed everything up from Baker Street and left it behind him in a storage unit locker for which he promptly and deliberately lost the key.
He went as far away from London and its charcoal palette and its brooding mournful clouds and its frigid people and that packed and locked storage room as he could get.
He drifted for a while, from one unlikely spot to the next: Lisbon, Dakar, Malta, Suez, Mumbai. Somehow he ended up here, on the far side of Kowloon. He liked it here, better than elsewhere anyway. He liked the heat and the humidity, both of which eased the constant ache in his shoulder. He liked the noise and the colours: the Chinese reds and hysterical tropical greens, the turquoise and marine blues. They kept him distracted.
He liked that everybody he met seemed to have secrets that they weren't interested in sharing. He liked that people looked him in the eye and gave him a strong handshake when he met them and afterwards never touched him again. He liked that their eyes only stayed on him when there was business to transact, but otherwise looked away: slid sideways or down or over his shoulder, always moving.
He'd bought the bar on Chan Man Street cheap from a Portuguese who was in a hurry to leave town. John didn't know why and didn't really care. He had enough cash to bribe his way into the place and out of whatever trouble the Portuguese had got into.
When the local thugs came in to shake him down for protection John had his cricket bat and his army training and his unwillingness to look away this time and that problem went away too.
Most nights after he pulled down and padlocked the metal shutters behind him, he walked around the corner to the little noodle shop that stayed open late. He'd struck up a friendship of a type with Leung, the proprietor, who graciously and patiently allowed him to practice his Cantonese over a bowl of chilis and beef noodle soup.
Leung hinted that John should take up with his pretty daughter Wei Ping who had a quick laugh and sharp black eyes and was much too young for him.
So, sometimes John took Wei Ping for walks along the sea wall, or they road a mini bus up into Sai Kung Park and walked the paths there. She was sweet and kind and only very carefully curious about him in a way he found easy to deflect. She was well-educated and fluent in English. She liked teaching him the history of her homeland and only giggled occasionally at his bad Cantonese.
Sometimes she took his hand and that was okay. He let her.
He didn't kid himself. The minute a younger man came into her life he knew she would leave. They both did.
But, they didn't tell Leung that.
And Leung pretended not to know it.
On nice nights after the bar closed, after his dinner/breakfast of noodles with Leung, if he wasn't too tired John sometimes wandered down to the marina. He stared out over the water of Port Shelter at the boat traffic lights drifting and reflecting and drawing along the black canvas of the water and mountains. He liked the hollow chime of lanyards clanking against the metal masts of the sailboats.
He thought idly about selling the bar and buying a sailboat.
Sometimes he stayed long enough to watch the sun come up behind the Park's green mountains.
On nights when the monsoon poured down he went back to his small, single room flat on Fuk Man Street. He stretched out on the narrow, single bed and read until he fell asleep.
Or sometimes he just watched the water smear the street neon across the window into rainbow tears.
Sometimes he drank whiskey.
Sometimes too much.
"Fuk Man Street," he would say quietly to himself on such nights. "What do you think of that, Sherlock? I live on Fuk Man Street now. Just in case you've decided to not be dead."
NOTES:
This got kicked off with my nightly tool across the planet playing around on MapCrunch. In Sai Kung, Hong Kong I came across a place called "Watson's Wine Cellar" - there's a picture of it on my tumblr. () . As it turns out in RL (according to Wikipedia anyway) Watson's is a premier purveyor of liquor in Hong Kong and Macau and not the somewhat seedy if comfortable hole in the wall pub I picture it as.
And Fuk Man Street is also real, about a block from Watson's. The whole area is more upscale and touristy than I would have it in my fic, but there you go. Those of you that know me know I like to play fast and loose with RL references in my fic.