It's not getting any better.

There was a sun. A brilliant, burning, flaring, violent exothermic nuclear reaction, that lit his life and burnt away the nightmares, that turned him from winter to summer. That singed his hair and gave him a burn and made everything visible. It was terrifying and glorious, to discover that he had fallen into orbit around such a sun. Not some safe little star, but a giant, a celestial mass of such volume and intensity that all other suns paled by comparison.

Then it all went wrong. Supernova, he thinks. And what is left behind is a black hole in the pit of his stomach.

All the light is gone out of the world. He does not know how he will cope. And time is not healing this.

John stands in the freezer section and tries to understand what his eyes are looking at. It takes effort. He's been standing there for several minutes, he thinks, and tries to shake himself out of the distraction. He reaches for the freezer door-handle to open it and grab something, some random brightly coloured package that might involve frozen vegetables which he absolutely loathes, and feels it tear open inside his guts like stitches. It howls and howls and draws everything into itself, all the careful little thoughts he's had skimming over his mind all week about needing to pull out money and needing to pay bills and needing. And he keeps moving, grabs a package and drops it in his basket without knowing what he's gotten and moves to the front of the store to pay because this is what you do. Like being a train on railroad tracks instead of a car on the motorway, he allows the requirements of his life to move him along.

If anyone speaks to him, he knows he smiles a little smile and replies and is generally as pleasant as he can manage being. He is polite, excruciatingly polite, and courtesy is a brilliant set of armor to keep everyone away. Some of them look worried despite his best of forts; those, he avoids.

He picked up the gun and held it the other day. Looked at it, really looked at it, and contemplated what it could do to a human body in exquisite clinical detail. Considered shooting the wall. Did not do so because it would be overly dramatic and excessively grieving and possibly get him sent away, and he does not want that. He eyes the thought warily and puts the gun down on the end table, where he can reach it. In case he needs it.

What he could possibly need it for is beyond him. The monster is dead and gone. Buried in an unmarked prison plot that Mycroft showed him one day, sympathy oozing from his every pore. But the weapon gives him - not comfort, no. The weapon is like a rock in his mind, a steady stable point.

Mycroft has the violin. Do you play, then, he asked without thinking, just to say something, and felt like such a fool after. Mycroft looked at him so kindly. No, he replied. Tone deaf. And he put it away in its case and John walked out.

He thinks the lines on his face have gotten deeper. He imagines that someday they will carve straight through his skull, and the pieces of his head will fall apart like a puzzle leaving his body just sitting there.

He thinks perhaps he has gone a little mad.

There was the emotional paralysis leading up to and after the funeral. There was the denial and the confusion. The fact that he couldn't go near the flat. The bedsit he ended up in.

Mycroft.

Mycroft brought him the papers. Said to keep them safe. Said they were important. Had his minions haul them in, boxes and boxes of them smelling like the flat, like acids and oils and wet newspaper. Mycroft could have stored them in a storage locker somewhere, John thinks, looking at them cluttering up his room. Mycroft who does look fatter now than before. More tired. Less pristine.

He waits until everyone is gone to open one, and to his surprise, he does not cry. Instead, he feels as though some terrible ending has been postponed, some doom temporarily stayed. As though he is balancing on a very fine wire, gliding on the merest thread of a breeze. It's not hope, then; but it is something. Some suspension of his fears.

Lestrade comes by. John has mostly forgiven him for not being enough to protect Sherlock from the monster. He's just a DI, after all. Barely even that after the press got ahold of him.

Lestrade brings the old case files John asked for. The ones that fill in the gaps on the stories.

He begins to write again.

He writes blog entries. Nothing personal. Nothing with himself in it. He spent months pulling notes and research papers together with his own recollections of little things Sherlock said. He sorted and filed and stacked and collated. And now he's got them, and all set and ordered neatly in a way that would absolutely appall Sherlock, so he starts writing. Because he cannot bear to hear the crap people are saying, because the record is wrong, because more than believing he knows deep in his bones that the things in the press are lies like wounds on the truth. He is a doctor. He can stitch this. So he uses words, and once he starts typing he does not stop. He types for days, barely getting up. It feels like fighting.

Sometimes he gets tired. Sometimes he crashes on the end, barely remembering to pull the blanket over himself. He remembers to shower and eat, mostly. But mostly he reads, and he writes.

It's an obsession, and he knows he's become a bit of the mental case locked in his room. But it feels so good, to have Sherlock there solving things in front of his eyes. To write up the notes and turn them into stories. To put them out there into the world, over and over, one story after another. Even when the comments come flooding in and are horrible, hateful, loathing, death threats. He starts keeping the gun closer, now, with some of the things people say. He gets twitchy going to the store. His shoulders hunch, his eyes flicker.

Nothing so pointless as fear can stop him on this, though.

He's got a mission.

Lestrade comes by a lot, after that. They spend time pouring over the files. Lestrade wants him to report the death threats to Donnovan. John looks flatly back at him. Greg is forgiven; Sally is not. Besides, he says, with a shrug as he goes limping back to the fridge for an apple and some cheese, it's not like the threats are a secret or anything. Sure, some of the worse ones come to his public e-mail, but a lot of them are comments on the blog. Open for anyone to see. If the police want to know about them they will. If they want to investigate they will.

So far, Lestrade is the only one who has come by with concerns, and he's not really a police anymore.

Someone throws paint all over the bedsit's front door. Red paint.

John moves out. The family who owns the building are apologetic but firm.

Lestrade helps him with the boxes.

There are dead rats pushed through the mail slot.

Mycroft sends a van and minions, and tries to arrange a more secure location.

John refuses. He won't live like that.

They burn down the rental.

Everything was scanned in anyways, a database secure enough to put the NSY to shame, locked by an RSA key Mycroft handed him casually some time ago. He didn't think anything of it then. Now…. Mycroft foresaw this, John thinks as he stands in front of the burning house, watching the firemen work to put it out. Petrol, they say, and John agrees; he smelled it while he was writing, grabbed what he needed and bolted. He's standing there on the street wearing his robe, barefoot, holding his laptop. The gun is dragging the pocket of the robe down on one side but no-one is about to comment on the state of his clothing. He has refused a shock blanket and refused to sit. His mind is working.

This wasn't the act of people passively angry about a con artist, he thinks. This was an act of war.

A car pulls up. The door opens and Anthea is in the back.

John feels something fierce and victorious inside.

There's a battle going on. He knows it. Somewhere out of sight something is happening, in the dark, beyond his senses.

He gets in the car.