Disclaimer: The characters of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John Watson, Mycroft Holmes, Inspector Lestrade, Mrs Hudson and James Moriarty are the intellectual property of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and I hold no claim upon them.
A/N: John post-Reichenbach. Semi-inspired by the song "With You" from the musical Ghost, (I'd check it out if I were you, it's so beautiful). Rated T just in case! Hope you enjoy :)
Rain in November; it shouldn't be that surprising… It wasn't like British weather had any sense of regularity normally – but for weeks the sky had remained thickly grey and overcast, downpours occurred frequently and often lasted for days at a time. It was dismal, drab, depressing. Maybe the sky was succeeding in doing what John had still not managed…
Three months; where had those three months gone? In many respects it felt like no time at all had passed, yet each day that John inhabited felt like it could stretch out for eternity. Time had lost its concept; life had lost its concept…
John had moved in with Harry two days after the funeral; before all of this had happened he had never, ever thought that he would live with his sister. Harry could be challenging at the best of times, and the alcohol made that even worse, but none of that had a grain of importance for John now. Every day had become the same; during the hours of 11am and 1pm Harry and whatever friend she had round would start drinking, by 3 or 4pm they would be slightly more than tipsy, by 6pm they'd be so drunk that it wasn't possible for them to stand upright, they'd pass out and be unconscious for several hours before waking up and crawling into bed. It was a pitiful existence. John knew he shouldn't be encouraging his sister down this path, but he sometimes joined her. Glasses in hand, brother and sister would both attempt to drown their separate sorrows in whisky.
It had taken a long time for it to sink in, Sherlock was gone. Sherlock was dead. But no – it had to be some kind of elaborate hoax. John knew that Sherlock hadn't created Moriarty; all that the press had written since was so wrong that John couldn't bear to read it anymore. The anger that had raged through John in the week following Sherlock's….
He still couldn't think about what had happened at the hospital without his heart wrenching in his chest. He could feel the heat searing at the back of his eyes and a lump forming at the base of his throat – but there had never been any tears… Mycroft had been around for a bit aftwerwards, always with a calm acceptance that infuriated John. Why wasn't he angry? How could he just accept it so plainly?
All John wanted was his friend back… Sherlock hadn't just taken his own life on the day that he jumped from St. Bartholemew's hospital… he had ripped all of John's hopes, all his dreams and plans for the future out from underneath his feet. The city of London had become a hazardous place for John; all of the places that Sherlock and he had ever visited, walked, or merely passed made his insides compress and his breath catch high in his chest. It was impossible to go anywhere. Sometimes he even imagined that he could hear conversations between himself and Sherlock, the ones that had been left unfinished, that had trailed off into infinity… and were now impossible to ever be reclaimed.
His feet pounded the pavement along with the rain that was falling around him; he had just needed to get out of Harry's house, needed some fresh air and space. He wasn't even paying attention to where his feet were taking him, he was on automatic pilot. He walked… and walked… and kept on walking…
It was the last place he had expected to end up; standing on the exact spot that he had watched it happen. Two hundred feet away from the hospital he raised his eyes to the roof; the rain was battering down on the top of his head and streaming from his hair into his eyes. John was convinced that someone had just scooped his heart out of his chest, leaving the cavity behind it rattling with the wind. John had never felt so empty before in his entire life.
His feet were moving again, without his brain being in control of them. He was floating about like a ghost, not attracting the attention of anyone or anything…
He was on the roof… and his knees were shaking beyond anything he could control, it was as though his very soul inside him was crumbling, dissolving into the rain coming down from the sky.
But he needed this, he needed to stand here; he needed to get it into his head that Sherlock wasn't coming back…
"I still don't understand." He whispered quietly, the noise of the rain completely drowning out his voice. "Why, I mean… why couldn't you explain? Why you had to do that?" John clenched his jaw as hot tears sprang to his eyes and he fought to keep them back. "I kept thinking that you'd appear somewhere, like that couldn't possibly be the end of Sherlock Holmes… no, no way…" John shook his head, and sniffed – he was glad that he was alone on this roof. "You… you changed me, you changed my life! And now you're just… when you jum-" John couldn't fight the tears anymore, they slid down over his cheeks. "You took my life along with you and left me here." John took a few steps forwards, until he was balanced on the edge of the roof. This was the place, the last place Sherlock had stood. He raised his head and surveyed around him, this was the last view that Sherlock had taken in. "You left me here! And I don't know whether to hate you for that, or to join you…" the last part of that sentence John had not divulged to anyone… He had hardly let it register in his head that he was thinking it. "I just don't know what – I can't…" John sighed.
One step, that's all it would take to join Sherlock. One foot up and down, he could do it with his eyes closed… The rain was torrential now, deafening, all-encompassing, he could go surrounded by water and tears…
But there was pressure on John's back that felt like a hand holding onto his coat, then John felt a warm presence close to his left ear, then whispered words:
"I didn't take anything with me, and all I've longed to do is join you…"