Author's note: This is as much headcanon for me about events post-Reichenbach as it is a fic meant to develop characters in the interim period between seasons 2 and 3. I never liked the thought of John Watson simply moping around and *maybe* getting married for three years, and so wanted to write something more...intricate. Updated whenever I have time. Mary Morstan will exist, but will be somewhat...different. Hopefully I'll be able to get to that point before the next series starts!
"He's… gone, John." Molly said, wiping her eyes.
John Watson moves out of 221b Baker Street a few days after the fall. He finds a room a couple of streets away and, without even processing how much it had been, signs over a month's worth of rent to the young landlord couple. Mrs. Hudson drops by a few times a week to leave him food, which John always thanks her for. She occasionally stays for dinner. He's not a very good conversation partner.
Harry texts him daily after he made the last post on his blog and stopped answering his phone. John forces himself to respond, some days. Harry doesn't mind his terseness, or he doesn't notice if she minds. Mike Stamford only tries once to invite him out for a drink, which he politely declined. Stamford seemed to understand.
A week goes by. John goes through the daily motions of sleeping, sometimes eating, leaving the small telly on, turning it off whenever unsolved crimes came up in the news. He didn't want to know what was said. He finds himself staring at nothing often, sometimes sitting at the small folding table with an unfinished plate, sometimes lying on the low mattress gazing at the off-white ceiling, sometimes in front of his laptop at a site he doesn't remember visiting. And sometimes, he gazes out the narrow window at the unfamiliar street. However much he stares, it doesn't become any more familiar.
He supposes he really isn't paying attention.
He can't afford to pay attention.
Sometime in the last eighteen months, John has probably dashed down this street in the middle of the night, mere steps behind another man. And if he just focused, if he just closed his eyes and saw that street, and those lights, and that familiar lanky figure with his black overcoat billowing in the wind, he might just go mad.
Another week or two passes. John leaves the room now, because he's found it makes no difference where he is, as long as he simply looks at everything and nothing. In a temporary burst of self-reflective energy, he makes an appointment with the psychiatrist he has not thought about for eighteen months, and keeps it. But the energy's gone by the time he finally sits down in her office.
"You need to get it out." She says. He doesn't even bother to read her writing upside-down any more. "What was it you couldn't say to him?"
"I… can't. I'm sorry." That's all John can manage. His memories, uncaged for a split moment, flutter out on iridescent wings. The soft breath of their passing hits him like a winter storm the moment he steps back into his room, and he buries his head in his arms and sobs.
Lestrade drops by, alone. They talk about nothing in particular at first, but John notices the new lines under his eyes and across his brow. He's being investigated. Demoted, at the least, Lestrade says, but everyone knows it's not going to end there. And then there are the trials, and the lawyers demanding to see evidence – "actual proof, nothing touched by that detective." Lestrade's surprisingly calm about it.
"Not as many as I thought there would be." He says. "Even if they end up throwing out anything he touched… we were good enough, we've always had separate evidence. Thanks to him, really."
John fails to resist asking. "Then you don't think he was…"
Lestrade sighs. "No. Sod him, no, I don't."
John is watching telly. It's all crap afternoon news, he can tell, but not enough to care. There's weak sunlight outside, and it peeks through the blinds like a bashful stalker as he idly flips through channels.
"… yes, I'm glad our justice system will be able to set it right. It's appalling, the state of our police force, and the public has a right to know that our defenders of the peace were relying on a sociopathic madman -"
The reporter asks something, the camera pans, and John catches a glimpse of red hair and horn-rimmed glasses. There is a sudden ringing in his ears.
"- and if Richard Brook hadn't bravely confessed, no one would ever have known!" Kitty Riley crows, in a red pantsuit and a pink blazer far more ostentatious than the one he had last seen her in. "Impossible cases only he can solve? It's mad! Imagine, Scotland Yard, taken in by an overblown fake like Sherlock Holmes -"
There is a crash and tinkle of shattered glass as the remote flies out of his hand into the TV screen. John stands in the deafening silence, panting, staring at the shards nesting into the colorless carpet. A moment later, he grabs his jacket and forces his way through the front door into the afternoon light.
The landlord couple wouldn't be home yet; they both work. He would have to pay for a replacement at least, but at that moment, John doesn't care. There is a white-hot fury pounding in his head that he has not felt since facing "Richard Brook" in Kitty Riley's living room, not even when Mycroft Holmes had told him that everything had been - and would now forever be - his fault. He strides on, the dull sun and the streets blurring together in his eyes, and turns and turns again until he no longer has the slightest idea of how far he's gone or where he is.
Only then does he bother to look up.
John stands upon a small bridge, the river beneath it flowing into the distance. London seems to stretch invisibly all about him, a great glimmering web of metal and brick and bustling, languid beneath the summer sun. Though the bridge is momentarily silent, he nonetheless hears everything: the hails of "taxi!" on the flowing streets, the chatter of the ever-loitering young, the clipped steps and hurried voices of businessmen and women rushing – they never walked any other way – to and fro, and the very breathing of the city whose gray-stone touch set them all in motion. And as he looked, finally seeing, John lets his memories take wing.
Here by the river was a drowned man and an assassin. There in the faraway high-rise was a locked-room murder. Here were the routes a serial killer cabbie had driven, and there once stood a man wired in a bomb jacket. Here were buildings whose roofs he had clambered across, there were streets he had sprinted through, and all of it was irrevocably and impossibly connected to one man. A man who had cared far too much to show it, but who fought tooth and nail for it all, for just as sun-parched Afghanistan had been John's battlefield, London belonged to Sherlock Holmes.
And now he was gone, and London had turned on him.
Having been able to call Sherlock his friend was one of the greatest honors John could ever have known. But in the end, even though John owed him so much, he could neither protect him, nor clear his name, nor even understand why he'd -
John thought he might be crying again, whether from helplessness, sorrow, or rage, he couldn't tell. But as he clenched his fists and turned away, trying to retain a measure of military calmness, someone spoke up timidly from behind him.
"Er… John?" Molly Hooper asked.
She'd gotten off work early for once, Molly had said as they walked. No, there were still the same number of bodies, but any detectives that came in didn't need her specifically as often as… they used to. So she was taking a walk home - well, yes, it was a bit far, but she felt like the air would do her good - and then she saw John wandering and… well. Would he like to have coffee? And here they were.
The café was tiny, homey, and mostly unoccupied. Molly ordered two small coffees despite John's protests, and pressed one on him with somewhat uncharacteristic firmness. John dumped an entire packet of sugar in his without acknowledging to himself any reason for doing so. For a few moments, they merely sat and sipped, silently. And then, as John thought dully about trying to make conversation and wondered exactly what he could say, Molly spoke first.
"You… miss him a lot, don't you. Sherlock, I mean."
"…yes," John said, although it had not been a question. He suddenly realized that, outside of going to the morgue with Sherlock, apologizing for his caustic comments, and that one aborted Christmas party, he had never really spoken with Molly. All he knew was that she had once liked Sherlock. He didn't know if she still did. "Do you… well, I guess he wasn't usually very nice to… I mean -"
"No, it's all right," Molly said quickly. "I know he wasn't. Didn't care about being nice, I mean. But he was brilliant, and the morgue's just not the same without him – oh god, sorry, I didn't mean it like that – um, yes. I do miss him."
"Yes, I… suppose other detectives don't come in and hit the corpses with a riding crop, do they?" John tried to grin, and knew as he did that he was making a piss-poor job of it, though Molly nevertheless laughed, a little. But as she set down her coffee and looked at him, John thought she looked suddenly, unexpectedly, determined.
"John, I… well, I know this sounds weird coming from me, but it's all right to smile, you know. He wouldn't have wanted you to be sad just because of him."
John opened his mouth but found nothing to say. Molly went on, "When I saw you on that bridge, you looked like… a bit like my mum, after my dad died. Like you didn't think you could – like you never wanted to be happy again. But you were his – Sherlock's - best friend, and I know he wouldn't want that for…"
"Yeah," John said, staring intently at his coffee cup and trying to force down the hot lump that had risen into his throat. "I know. I think. He… pretty much told me, actually, before."
"He did?"
He forced himself to meet Molly's look of concern, "before… you know. He wanted me to tell you, and Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade, that he was… a fake. I didn't understand then… but, he probably thought it'd make it easier or something, if we didn't care about him. That incredible idiot…"
"…so that you wouldn't grieve for him," Molly said softly. "he wanted to protect you, then."
"The hell with that!" John burst out, and was immediately contrite as Molly jumped, and several heads turned to look disapprovingly. "Sorry. I'm… so sorry. But he…" he forced himself to speak more quietly, although his voice was shaking again and a sudden torrent of emotions threatened to drag him under, "where does he get off on trying to protect me, when he wouldn't let me do the same - he wouldn't even let me near him, Molly, I couldn't do anything to help him, not with the code, not with Moriarty - I didn't even understand why he had to – had to…"
He stopped.
Sherlock, in his stupid insane idiotic way, had been trying to protect him from… what?
"Molly," John kept his voice calm with some slight difficulty, "Sherlock, before he… did he ask you anything about Jim, or tell you something, or… anything? Anything at all? Please…"
Molly looked at her coffee with an odd expression; John wondered if she was trying to remember something. After another few moments, she shook her head. "Sorry… the last time I saw him was when we did the analysis, you were there too. He didn't… say anything to me, John."
"I see…"
John stared down at his half-finished drink as well, and then came to a decision. "I'm sorry, Molly," he said, getting to his feet and carefully pushing his chair aside, "I have to go. There's something I have to… I need to do…"
"John, wait."
Molly stood as well. John wondered if she was going to try to dissuade him from leaving, but she only looked at him with the same strange determined expression as before, and said, "if there's anything I can do, anything that'll help… just ask. It's okay. I know you need to do this. But if you're thinking about Jim, please… don't do anything dangerous or stupid or, you know. Sherlock wouldn't… I don't want to see you in my morgue as well, John."
If Sherlock wanted me to keep out of this, he shouldn't have been such a stupid git in the first place, John wanted to say, that and so much more, but when he met Molly's eyes he couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead, he only nodded, not trusting his voice, and strode back out into the late afternoon.
"Sherlock, he's your best friend… did you actually think he wouldn't try to find out everything that happened?"
"Yes, maybe it sounds stupid to you. But… that's the way people are. Honestly, it'd be even more suspicious if he didn't do anything. So…"
"…I know. I'll watch over him, I promise."