If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.
-Lord Byron; "When We Two Parted"
The world has kept going, and he has gone on with it, and yet his heart is still within him. These past years have been cruel to him – his very breath has been stolen from his lungs, and he suffocates. All that was beautiful, all that was vibrant, every fleeting, wonderful thing, has vanished. The fragility of life has never been so real. The pointlessness of it has never been so crushing.
He has forgotten what it is like to sleep without nightmares, to walk without limping, to see without gazing through a blurred veil of tears. His life is a haunted shadow of what it once was. He is a spectre, wandering aimlessly through that which was once dear, but which is now only a reminder of the pain.
He misses Sherlock.
But Sherlock is dead.
The first year he tries to be brave. He tries to move on, to cherish the memory of his friend as something delicate and brilliant and infinitely precious as he works around the gaping abscess created by Sherlock's death. He looks for a job, looks for a new flat and a fresh start, even considers moving in with Harry for the time being until he can work something out. But his leg starts to give out on long walks, and Mrs Hudson can't bear the thought of him leaving 221B, and he can't bear the thought of leaving either. To leave Baker Street would be to leave his life behind – or, at least, to leave behind what is left of it, what hadn't already been torn away.
He can't break the habit of making two cups of tea, so for a time he drinks both cups so none of it goes to waste. After a while, though, he just leaves the second cup on the counter, waiting for someone to take it, knowing that no one ever will.
Mrs Hudson dumps the untouched tea out at the end of the day. John never thanks her, but he watches her as she leaves in the kitchen and nods slightly and that is enough.
The second year, he starts going through Sherlock's old things. The reality has sunken in, and as he finally comes to terms with the fact that there will be no irritated, preoccupied, brilliant, perfect Sherlock to tell him off if he starts going through all the experiments and case-books and sheet music, he starts spending hours of his time in Sherlock's room. There's so much in there. It's amazing, really. For months, John hardly leaves the flat, and Mrs Hudson makes sure he has three meals a day, more or less.
The first night he sleeps in Sherlock's bed because he's too tired to take the stairs to his own, he wakes up three times in the middle of the night because he thinks he feels Sherlock beside him, or standing over him, or watching him from the doorway, and he's miserable.
After that, he can't sleep anywhere else.
The third year, he stops noticing the rest of the world. He picks up Sherlock's violin sometimes, with careful and trembling hands, and picks out a single tune, the only one he remembers, the one that Sherlock played so often. He doesn't know what it is. It's not what he would have called a sad song, but it makes him weep. If he closes his eyes and looks hard enough, he can see Sherlock playing it, standing by the window in his dressing gown.
The bedroom is drafty sometimes. The window is cracked open; it has been since Sherlock died, and John hasn't closed it. His own room upstairs goes untouched, as he spends all his time in Sherlock's.
One day, he gets up and limps out of Sherlock's room and through the flat to the fireplace, where the skull sits on the mantle. It grins horribly at him and he hates it but he talks to it anyway, because he's almost forgotten what his voice sounds like and because Sherlock used to do it all the time. He talks until his voice gives out and then he goes back to Sherlock's room. He doesn't talk to the skull again. It's too weird.
He misses Sherlock.
The world fades, slowly. Colours lose their vibrancy, heat loses its warmth, and all that's left is a dull, constant chill at his core. Mrs Hudson comes and goes, and once he even sees Mycroft, but he can't ever see anyone for too long. It's horrible and he's tired and he doesn't remember what it's like to talk without the back of his throat burning.
His watch stops working because the battery runs out. He doesn't know when it stops, but it remains stuck at 6:01 so from then on it's always 6:01.
Then one day he looks up because he hears the door open behind him and his neck hurts as he turns it because it's gotten sore and Sherlock's standing there.
He can't think of any words, so he just looks.
Sherlock looks back, and he says something, but the words don't really make sense and the noise falls strangely on his ears that have become so accustomed to silence. He flinches.
Sherlock steps forward, suddenly, and bends and seizes him by the forearms. Sherlock's hands are cold, and the grip is hard, and it hurts.
He can't think anymore, and it's not fair that Sherlock's come back now, after so long, when he could have come back any time and didn't. He doesn't want to be haunted by a physical memory of what he's lost when he's already surrounded by so many of his own.
Sherlock shakes him, drawing their faces close together and speaking louder, faster. When it doesn't work, he slows down and speaks softer, grip more gentle, eyes more pleading.
He doesn't want to. He shakes Sherlock's grip off his arm and turns away just as his vision blurs, just as the first tears fall. The sound that rips from his throat surprises him, but it's better than the burn, better than the welling feeling of pain in his chest, so he sinks back to the floor and his whole body shakes.
Sherlock turns and leaves. He hears the receding footsteps.
But then, suddenly, he recognises the voice, understands the words, sees the face and feels the touch. He's still so tired, so empty, but he drags himself up and through the flat, down the stairs and out the door. His legs shake underneath him and when he steps outside, there's suddenly too much noise and light and air, but he clings to the doorknob and yells Sherlock's name. The name feels strange, like something he's forgotten how to say but never forgotten how to feel.
But Sherlock is gone.
So he turns back into the silence of the flat and closes the door behind him. He can't make it back up the stairs so he sits on the bottom step, curled into himself. He can't see again because of the tears, so he closes his eyes again and sees Sherlock's face there.
He stays there until he can breathe again, and then he drags himself back up the stairs and into Sherlock's room. He closes the door behind him, lies down on the bed, falls asleep, and wakes up.