DISCLAIMER: I own none of the scenes depicted, nor do I own the characters. Everything belongs to the BBC and BBC Sherlock.

John sat in his armchair in the sitting room of 221B. It's the same place he had been sitting for about a week now, not feeling the need to get up for anything besides using the toilet. Many times, he has found his hand ticking the way it would when he returned from the war. When he does, he just shakes his hand, as if to shake away the trauma that has caused his hand to twitch.

He closes his eyes. It was supposed to be just a blink, but it ended up lasting a bit longer. When he closed them, he found himself standing in the street, looking up at the roof of a towering building in front of him. He is holding his mobile to my ear, and he can hear Sherlock's voice. "No one can be that clever." The saying rings through his like a thousand church bells clanging at once inside his body. "You could," he says into the speaker of his mobile. The scene fades as he opens his eyes, and he realizes he never left his armchair.

His hand is ticking again. He shakes the twitch out, and then cracks his knuckles. His chest feels heavy, making it hard to breathe, and his sight is a bit blurry from the tears that have now formed in his eyes. He blinks them away, looking up to the ceiling and breathing deeply. No matter how hard or how much he blinks, the tears won't stop, and he let out a loud sob. He closes his eyes again to hold back another, but find himself back on the street. This time, he is not standing. He is lying on the pavement, and he finds that his leg hurts. He's been hit by a cyclist. The first thing that goes through his head is shit. He looks up, panicked and infuriated. As he scrambles to his feet, he looks ahead and sees a body lying on the sidewalk. There is blood, so much blood. He realizes it's not just a body, but it's Sherlock's body. "No, no, no," he says. He scrambles to Sherlock's aide, pushing people to the side as he makes his way to his best friend's limp body. "He's my friend, let me through," he says, and the people do so willingly. John drops to his knees and closes his eyes, and when he opens them he is back at 221B. He is no longer in the armchair, though, but he is kneeling on the floor in his sitting room. I can't take this anymore, he thought. It's getting to be too much.

The flashbacks and the memories are all too much for John to bear now. At first, they weren't that bad, but it's been almost three years now, and they get worse and worse with each passing moment. It's time for me to end it.

John closes his eyes again, and this time he finds himself sitting across from Sherlock at a table at some restaurant in London. Sherlock gives John a small smile, and John can't help but smile back. He is everything John could have ever wanted, and he can't believe how long it took him to find Sherlock. It saddens John that he didn't have a chance to tell Sherlock so before it was too late. He was John's best friend – which was a nicer way of saying that Sherlock was his only friend, and John didn't want to live without him. He opens his eyes and finds himself on a rooftop. He looks down and realizes that it is the same place Sherlock met his demise. Now it was John's turn, and what better place to end his life than the place that ruined it? He closes his eyes one last time. This time, there were no flashbacks and no bad memories. There was just blackness. He gave a long, shaky sigh of relief and took a step, his arms out to his sides like wings that couldn't fly. After all, falling is just like flying, but with a more permanent destination.