A/N: This would have been in 'A Thousand Candles', but I prefer it as a one-shot. There is one Sherlock reference, because I felt like it and it just flows.

Black rose on a dusty road on fire

Burns in the distances higher.
Hot stones both marks if they're my own
Stretches to the distant horizon.

Oh darling, are you gonna leave me?
I'll watch you if you can.

I am still holding onto your waistband,
Turn away and kick out the red sand.
Summer is gone and now I'm bleeding,
I can't tell now you're thinking of leaving.

London Grammar – Darling Are You Gonna Leave Me

Clara

Let's stop pretending right now, shall we? Lead the way, my tortured love (for you) and we'll ask the sun and moon to sleep. You still hold me tightly like a comatose dream, and I can't (won't) remember what it was like to be awake. But if I am asleep and dreaming of you, then I stubbornly refuse to rise. When I cross the stream to my other life I will roam those worn-down streets with no mind to pay to the florists on Baker Street. My heart is still with you, and without it, what else is there? My days slip into a crevice of time, so quickly that if it were a sound, it would be just a whisper. I'm stuck fast, but it doesn't matter, because I'm still dreaming of you in all the corners of my mind. Somewhere, sometime at the edges of the universe I'll stay with you, in a place that time forgot. You will hold me tight and drag your softening tones across my skin in that enchanting voice of yours that you save for me alone. And I will cry because we aren't real anymore, my torso is being torn from my legs by people with smiling faces and venomous judgements. I'm screaming at them, my legs are still trapped in the fissure of my mind, but I will make do without them.

Then I will wake up.

I'll buy my own damn flowers from the florists on Baker Street; I'll take a rose from every single one. Now I have a dozen, one for each of your lives. I'll wait until they all run out and then I'll burn them in my fireplace. The room will be filled with their dying scent, and that is the closest I will get to seeing you again.

I'll call my old handy friend from high school to fix the blown vent in the oven and accept his offer of drinks later without so much as a stammered reply. The breaths should come easy as I make a perfect soufflé and eat it all by myself, full of its taste and texture. In a way it is easy to set you aside, despite the fact you will never be truly ignored. Perhaps that is because I already know that you will never be buried in that pending cemetery of old losses.

I won't let him take me home, because the dream still lives in me. I'll let the warm buzz of white wine fill my mind, clouding my senses and diminishing my thoughts. Watching the floor meet my body, my head will greet the tiles there. I will lay still in the deadening light, until some other call of life refuses me of my solace in exclusive solitude. I'll let the one-track melody of the dark wash through my senses, cleansing away everything that ties me to this place you have forsaken, and I will hold my breath until I pass out. I'm not yet tired enough to sleep, but I will always be ready to dream again.