A/N: Note transcript comes from arianedevere's episode transcript on LJ. Thanks to my husband for grammar/tense-checking, despite his distaste for fanfiction. I had to interrupt writing my other Sherlock fic (and another one-shot I'm working on) to get this out of my head, but that one will be updated soon. Hope you enjoy!

John Watson's mind is not like Sherlock's.

Not like Sherlock's was.

It's a good mind. A fine mind. But it's an upscale four-bedroom home with a larger than average garden. Not a palace.

There's more than enough room to live in. Enough to store his medical training for nearly immediate recall when needed. Enough for the important things. His memory isn't photographic by any stretch; usually there's room for the gist of things, but not rote memorization.

But this... this is an important thing. This gets the living room all to itself right now.

His last conversation. His note. John remembers every word of it, every nuance of his inflections and tone. He can't remember having a memory this clear, ever in his life.

In the hours after, it plays on a nonstop loop.

It's his note. His note. Notes aren't meant to be spoken into a mobile phone, they're meant to be written, permanent. John writes it down. Word for word. He types it. He writes it again, on a different type of paper. It has to look right, this is his note god damn it, his last words, it's got to be right. He wishes it were in Sherlock's handwriting. Then it would be right.

In the days after, he needs something solid. Something tactile to hold onto. A piece of him, a last piece. He reads it and rereads it, writes it out again, reads it again. The words are on the paper; his mind still supplies the tone. The frantic tone in the beginning. The tears in his voice later on.

John. Turn around and walk back the way you came now.
Just do as I ask. Please.
Stop there. Okay, look up. I'm on the rooftop.
I, I, I can't come down, so we'll ... we'll just have to do it like this.
An apology. It's all true. Everything they said about me. I invented Moriarty.
I'm a fake. The newspapers were right all along. I want you to tell Lestrade; I want you to tell Mrs Hudson, and Molly ... in fact, tell anyone who will listen to you that I created Moriarty for my own purposes.
Nobody could be that clever. I researched you. Before we met I discovered everything that I could to impress you. It's a trick. Just a magic trick.
No, stay exactly where you are. Don't move.
Keep your eyes fixed on me. Please, will you do this for me?
This phone call ... it's, um, it's my note. It's what people do, don't they ... leave a note?
Goodbye, John.

It's so painful to read, but it's all he has. It's his last thread to cling to, keeping him from losing it. It becomes like a mantra, the words losing meaning.

...

After a week, the worst of the smoke clogging his mind starts to lift. He moves out of the motel he's been staying in, back to the flat. He starts to feel again. One minute he's angry, tearing up his current copy of the note. How the hell could you give me such a shitty farewell? Where do you get off? Your last words, lies to your best friend.

The next, remorseful. Printing a new copy. I'm sorry, they're your last words, they're important, I'm an awful friend, I can't believe I did that. This copy will stay pristine, I promise. Until two hours later when he's tearing it up again.

Suddenly, nine days after, he's rereading the note when he sits up straight.

"Oh God!" Now he's talking to himself out loud. Great. Oh well. "These aren't just your last words, it's your last request! Your dying wish! For me to. . to lie about you to our friends. That's awful. What were you thinking?"

He pauses, frowns at the note as if seeing it for the first time. "What were you thinking?" Sherlock would never have made such an absurd request without a reason. I can't do it, Sherlock. I can't honor your memory by desecrating it. I can't handle the burden of being the only one on earth to know the truth. I can't... but I wouldn't be, would I? The others, they might believe it coming from me, but Mycroft knows. You didn't list him, and he's the only one who knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Moriarty exists. Could I handle it if I can go yell at him now and then? That might help.

John takes a day to sit on this. He watches the telly, he applies for a job, he goes through the motions of being alive. He wonders if he can shoulder this burden for his friend. He misses him. When it hits him it's still like a boulder, in these early days. He knows it will get easier, doesn't know if he wants it to. Has to sit down from the force of it. John will do anything for Sherlock, even dead. If he says to lie, he'll lie. There must be a reason. There must be. He has to trust Sherlock one more time.

...

On day ten, he calls Greg.

"I've... I've been going through his things, and I thought you should know..."

A pause. A long pause. Can he really do this?

"Know what? John, are you sure you're okay?"

"He... It... It's all true. I mean, the newspapers. Donovan. They were right. He was having us on the whole time."

"What? No. What did you find? Are you sure? Maybe you should let me look at whatever it is you've found, I'm sure you're not in any condition to -"

"No, it's - it's all right. I'd rather not show you just yet, it's still... It hurts. The pain's still a bit too fresh. But can you... can you just take my word for it, Greg? I know that won't hold up in an investigation, but I just... just thought you should know. Personally."

He wishes he could tell Lestrade how grateful he is for the skepticism. To know that he's not the only one who still believes. I might need to fabricate some "proof" one of these days, he thinks wearily, wondering if he'll ever have the energy for something like that again.

Exactly two weeks. He goes down to have tea with Mrs Hudson. Can't do it. He falls asleep with the note in his hand.

He does it the next day, though. As gently and carefully as he can. It hurts so much to hurt her, it hurts so much to lie about him. He hopes he's doing the right thing. But Sherlock was explicit. After this, Molly will be a piece of cake.

Day seventeen. He knocks on the door of her lab. When she answers, she's oddly flustered.

"John! You're here! I mean... I mean, why are you here? I mean, sorry. That sounded awful. How are you?" She's always been a rather nervous woman, but this feels out of place even for her. But she's had a shock, too, hasn't she? And about to get a bigger one. He's too busy pushing down his guilt as they make small talk to worry about whether or not it feels like she's hiding something.

"Molly, I have to tell you something. Something... not pleasant to hear."

"Okay." She nods firmly, seems to brace herself. Well, he has just said he's going to tell her something unpleasant.

"Sherlock... Well, I've been going through his things, and I found some documents. Contracts between him and that actor fellow. The newspapers were right, he was..." Clears his throat. The lie is easier than if it were the truth, but not that much. "He was lying. To all of us. The whole time."

"Oh." Her expression is most curious - like she's trying on one after the other, seeing which is best. Of course, he can't expect her to know how to feel about something like that. "Well, that's awful. That's... that's horrible."

He tries not to be annoyed that she doesn't ask him how he knows, if he's sure, like the others did. Loyalty's one last stand. Maybe she just trusts John too much.

He leaves a few minutes later, feeling even worse than he had with Mrs Hudson. Her tears were awful, but Molly had made him feel guilty not just about the lie, but about her as well. She was acting so odd, she hadn't reacted at all how he expected, and now he can't help but feel suspicious of her, and guilty about that suspicion. Everyone deals with these things in their own way, don't they?

Day eighteen. "Anyone who will listen." He writes and then deletes without posting five different blog entries. He can't do it. Telling the lie is one thing; putting it in writing, there alongside so many true stories and even comments by Sherlock himself - he just can't. If he's asked, he'll lie. But the blog will remain untouched, a tribute to the truth that no one can know. People will think he's either too embarrassed to admit on it that he was wrong, or that he just abandoned it in his grief.

...

Three weeks have passed. He's starting to function again. Not really, not deep down, but he goes to the store and buys food and has something other than takeaway for dinner for the first time since. As he eats, he sits down with the note again. He hasn't looked at it in three days, since he decided not to post in the blog, but something has been nagging at him. He's being ridiculous. He puts it away.

One month. Lestrade calls, falling over himself with apologies, but could he possibly see the documents John found? Of course. John spends the rest of the day drawing up a "contract" between Sherlock and Richard Brook. Sherlock's signature is easier to forge than he expected. He spends the next day in bed, feels like he's been knocked back at least two weeks in his recovery.

Forty-one days. He might even consider himself human again. He went on a job interview today; the interviewer was more interested in hearing about his time with Sherlock than in his qualifications. Ugh. He knows what she was thinking - was he in on the deception, or was he duped? Everyone's wondering it now. If he wants to get a job, he's probably going to have to talk to the press at some point. The public forgave his silence for a month; obviously he was grieving and in shock. Now they'll want to hear his side of the story, and will assume the worst about him if he doesn't provide it. Soon. He carries his dinner into the sitting room, fishes around for something else to think about. Anything else.

His eyes land on the shelf where he stuck the note between two books nearly three weeks ago. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so he lets himself pull it back out. Scans it; the nagging feeling is back. He feels like he's missed something. He's done as he was told, hasn't he? He sits down at the desk and spreads it before him once more. Reads it over again carefully. This time, one line jumps out at him in a way it never had before.

Keep your eyes fixed on me. Please, will you do this for me?

Again, why? He wasn't that cruel, why would he insist that John watch him jump? John closes his eyes and pushes his food away as the memory overtakes him. Sherlock tosses the phone away, John yells, Sherlock falls over the edge - wait. Why did he toss his phone away onto the roof? Why not put it back in his pocket?

The answer comes to John immediately, but he shoves it away as wishful thinking. He casts around for other explanations, doesn't find any for five full minutes, before finally letting the thought form fully. On the roof, it's safe. If it went down with him, it probably would have been destroyed. There's something on it he didn't want destroyed, and he wanted me to find it.

His hands are shaking. That's ridiculous. He wants there to be something, one last communication from beyond the grave; that doesn't mean that there is such a thing. He misses the intrigue of working on cases and is trying to create some himself. It's absurd, it's a manifestation of his grief. Ella would have a field day.

He manages to push the idea away long enough to get to bed. But at 2am he finds himself awake again after the now-familiar nightmare, tossing and turning and unable get the thought out of his head.

"Fine," he grumbles, getting up out of bed. "Can't hurt to check, can it, and then I can get some sleep."

The hospital had gathered up what personal effects they could find and gave the box to the next of kin. Mycroft, of course, had passed it on to John immediately, and it has sat untouched in Sherlock's room ever since. Now John opens the door to the room for the first time since the day of the burial.

He flicks on the light and pauses. He takes a deep breath as he looks around the familiar room, now invaded by several boxes of Sherlock's things moved in from other areas of the flat. At first he can't move, feels the tears misting up in his eyes again. After a moment he wipes them dry and breaks through the force field keeping him out of the room, heads straight to the box in question. Tries not to look at anything else, stay focused on his mission. A quick rummage through the box produces the mobile. He tries to switch it on... nothing happens. John squeezes his eyes shut and grinds his teeth. Of course not, of course it wouldn't still be charged over a month later. Nothing could be that easy, could it? Now where did he keep his charger...

He finally opens his eyes and scans the room. He knows Sherlock charged his mobile in his bedroom, he guesses it would have been by his bed so that it was easily accessible in the night. John goes to the nightstand, tries to ignore the other ephemera of his best friend's life lying around. The glass with an inch of water still in it, the first volume of the Feynman lectures with a bookmark sticking out halfway through, the - stop it, you're ignoring it, remember?

He locates the charger, dropped down behind the nightstand, unplugs it, and brings it into this own room. He finds that once the phone is plugged in, he has no trouble getting back to sleep knowing that he'll be investigating first thing in the morning.

When John wakes up on day 42, he grabs for the phone before he even gets out of bed. He pushes the button and the screen lights up. His hands are shaking again, and he reminds himself that this is probably all for nothing. There's probably nothing there.

Once the phone has started up, it asks for a passcode. Damn it. He slams it back down on his nightstand, feeling stupid for not seeing that coming. He clenched his jaw, willing himself not to cry. He wanted there to be something so badly; maybe this had been a bad idea from the start. Maybe finding nothing was worse than not trying at all.

After he's had a minute to calm down, he realizes that there are two possibilities: Either there is nothing, and the passcode is whatever Sherlock usually used and he was unlikely to guess it, or there is something, and Sherlock had reset the code to something he'd be able to guess. He idly tries the first few things to come to mind - 221B, JOHN, SHER. He doesn't expect any of them to work. They don't. He sighs and gets out of bed, grabs the note, and goes to make some tea.

With a hot mug in his hand, he sits down and spreads the note out in front of him, the phone lying next to it. If the clue leading him to the phone was here, the clue getting him into the phone will be, as well. It will be something that Sherlock thinks even he can figure out - but Sherlock wasn't always accurate about what John can and can't figure out. He sighs. This is a fool's errand, but he'll give himself today to worry over it. He's certainly not doing anything else, and it will make for a distraction. But if he can't get it today, he has to accept that there's nothing to find and move on. He nods, accepting the deal with himself.

He's only been staring at the note for an hour when he cocks his head to one side. Writing it down hadn't cleared it out of his head - he can still hear every detail of every inflection. And he knows - he'd known from the start - that some of it sounds rehearsed. Not all of it, but some of it Sherlock had clearly planned out beforehand. And here's what's odd, he realizes. Sherlock was not, in general, a stammerer. John is, certainly. Sometimes it feels like he can't get a sentence out without repeating something. Not Sherlock. But John hadn't thought much of the fact that he stammered a few times during the note, given what he was about to do and the state his mind must have been in at the time.

But.

John looks at the three places where Sherlock repeated himself. I, I, I; we'll, we'll; it's, um, it's - those were in fairly rehearsed bits. He hadn't known John would pull up in a cab right then, so the very start was off the cuff (and sounded so frantic, so scared, so - stop it), and of course whenever he'd responded directly to something John had said (crying, he'd been crying when he claimed it was all a trick - focus). But those sentences, they don't depend on context, they could have been planned in advance. And they sounded otherwise calm and smooth, not rushed and improvised. The stammering is definitely out of place. Or you want it to be.

John's heart races as he picks up the phone and slowly punches in 3-2-1-1, braces himself for disappointment. He slides the unlock button to one side... and it works. John nearly drops the phone. Instead, he gently places it back on the table and gets up to get a new mug of tea. He realizes that he wasn't quite prepared for this - for being right. For Sherlock's note to actually contain not only instructions, but a code. A posthumous vote of confidence that John would pay attention and figure it out. John's insides are a jumble as he can't sort out whether he's more pleased that Sherlock's final thoughts of him were so positive, or apprehensive about what might be on that phone. He gets some peppermint tea out for his stomach, then realizes he hasn't eaten anything and grabs an apple to take back to the other room with him.

He eats the entire apple and drinks the peppermint tea dry while staring at, but not touching, the phone. By the time he's finished it's put itself to sleep again, and when he finally picks it back up he has to enter the code once more. 3-2-1-1. He can't help smiling when it works again, still not quite believing this is happening. It feels like magic.

He's not sure where to start as he scrolls through the various apps. Decides that messages would be an obvious place to leave a message, and pulls up a list of Sherlock's sent and received texts. Sure enough, at the top of the list is an unsent message to John. He feels like his heart might jump right out of his chest, isn't sure he wants to read it now, isn't sure he could ever prevent himself.

I knew you'd get here.

SH

Attached is an audio file. John hopes it says a bit more than the text, realizes from the size it must say quite a bit more. Decides to shower and dress before he hits play.