Seven days.
A week of the kind of agony that chills to stoic grimness, to physical, inward acceptance that leaves the heart steady, that leaves the mind dull. The kind of horrified misery that cannot be felt by the one who experiences it, yet leaves its outward traces everywhere, exposing the gloom so that all around can sense the aura of hopeless continuation when its victim hardly recognizes it himself. It wouldn't have taken his keen, scintillating cerulean gaze to notice the slumped shoulders, the pink-lined eyes, the fingers lined with little cuts from restlessly scratching nails.
Seven very long days.
A week of ignoring Greg, dodging Mycroft's uncomfortable sideways glances. Of being utterly alone. Of silence permeated only by the ghost-echoes of violin music. Of going without shower or change or shave, of avoiding music and warmth and food and company, of being unsure whether I'd slept through the entire day or had simply lay on the couch gazing up at the pockmarked wallpaper with its ring of yellow paint smeared and faded. It didn't matter either way, really. Nothing mattered much anymore. Had it ever?
Seven. Fucking. Days.
A week since I'd seen the wheeled stretcher, heard its little rolling legs squeaksqueaksqueaking, watched the water drip from the flapping tails of that long, black coat, heard Greg's strangled voice yelling to the emergency crew to go faster, damnit! Do you not understand that he's... And listened to a man in a blue cotton coat with his nametag on it reply, Officer, I'm terribly sorry, but there's really nothing we can do.
Nothing they could... Of course there was nothing they could do. No one can ever do anything when it really matters. And it had mattered then.
Splayed arms, twisted to one side. Sickeningly off-center, pathetic, broken, like an enormous hand had reached down and grasped him, squeezed, folded him inward on himself. Face contorted into one of those ridiculous expressions of his, so melodramatically pained that it made my esophagus lace itself through the gaps in my ribcage to think I'd ever snickered at such an overly communicative countenance.
His dark curls were matted and wet and tangled together with blood.
His blood. He'd broken his skull clean open, they said later, his brain was mangled. Must have hit a rock. Or several. Bounced off.
Snap. Snap. Snap. Drip. Drip. Drip. That coat was paneled up in oak-wood now, the pressure of a thousand pounds of earth and roots and insect life on every side, nothing at all inside but a body. A wrecked and smashed and mangled and utterly dead body. And it didn't matter one bit that the mind inside that body had been mildly claustrophobic, that it would have abhorred the unchanging atmosphere of the inside of a coffin, that it would have lapsed into amused, half-irritated chuckles at our passionate testimonies of its heroic deeds, its friendship, its ability.
Because it no longer existed.
The vigilant, slightly manic eyes were closed, the curls hanging limp and dull, the pink lips shut, the white, nervous fingers with the violin-string calluses on the left tips forever stilled. The life of this human being had been sapped. Irreplaceably drawn from him. Vanished. Gone.
Dead.
And what was I without him? An ex-army-doctor with a deleted half-famous blog and a dead friend. I was an old man. A man with nothing left to look forward to, with everything that I'd existed for over and done with, a man whose purpose in life had been completed too soon.
Seven days ago, Sherlock Holmes had died.
And I, John Watson, had died with him.