Five Stages of Grief

Stage One: Denial & Isolation

Three days after The Fall

John sat in a chair in the flat and stared at the blank telly across the room. His jacket was still damp from standing in the rain during the funeral. He'd been asked to speak, but he hadn't been in the mood to say anything to do the man justice. Mrs. Hudson had spoken, and Lestrade, but John couldn't remember a thing either of them had said. Mycroft had stood in the back without saying anything or acknowledging anyone the whole time, as if three days were more than enough to get past his brother's death.

John still couldn't quite grasp the idea. Even as he sat, he expected Sherlock to come running up the stairs with a bag of fingers, or to step into the room and draw the bow across the strings of his violin.

There was a knock on the door. "John?" He recognized Mrs. Hudson's voice easily enough, but wasn't comprehending things enough to answer her. The floorboards creaked as she shifted her feet outside the door. "Right, dear, just let me know if you need anything. Anything at all."

He made tea later, and drank half of it before it got too cold for his liking. Around eight, Sarah called from the office to see if he would be in tomorrow. "No," he said. "I may not be in for a while, actually, just with - you know…" he trailed off. She acted like she understood what he was going through perfectly, even if he knew full well she couldn't possibly begin to imagine his position. But then, he didn't know that her brother had been killed in a car crash when she was twenty.

He must have fallen asleep at some point, because a knock woke him up at half-nine the next morning. "You expecting a client?" he asked before realizing his mistake. He heaved himself out of the chair and limped over to the door - he would have to get his cane from upstairs at some point - and was greeted by Mrs. Hudson. "Breakfast, dear." She offered a tray of hot food. John took it, mumbled a "thanks", and went back to the kitchen. He stared at the toast for a long minute as be tried to process the fact that Sherlock was not there, he was not expecting a client, and he would not be walking in at any point with a bag of fingers or his violin.

Stage Two: Anger

One month after The Fall

John sat in a cab and mentally kicked himself. This was what he got for getting attached to people. An inability to deal with loss causing the termination of his employment.

He had tried to go back - twice, in fact, within the span of a week - but he'd been unable to stay either time. Someone would invariably walk in with some trait or detail to remind John's subconscious of Sherlock, at which point John would either lock up or lash out. Sarah would have to come in and bail him out, he would apologize, and then the whole thing would happen again and again until he finally left. The second day, it only happened once before it was suggested he take a break. They may still have something open for him in a few months when he was ready, they'd said.

John was still stewing about this when the cab pulled up to Baker Street, which was why he didn't notice the black car parked outside his flat. He would have had to be both blind and deaf, however, to miss Mycroft's presence in the living room when he'd made it up the stairs. The man was sitting in Sherlock's chair and drumming his fingers on the table beside.

"What the hell are you doing here?" John demanded.

Mycroft smiled. "I came simply to offer my condolences. My brother's suicide must have hurt you a bit more than the rest of the population."

"Don't - don't talk about his suicide with me. Not like that. Just - " He fumbled for the right words.

"No one blames you, John. Don't do this to yourself. You were the best thing to happen to him for a while, to be perfectly honest."

"Shut up, Mycroft! I don't need to hear about it from my therapist, let alone you."

"John -" Mycroft started.

"He was your brother, for god's sake! If anyone should've seen it coming, it's you."

"Do not try to turn this around on me, Doctor Watson. The fact of the matter is, he's gone, and you're going to have to come to terms with that sooner or later."

John clenched his fist around his cane. "And how I come to terms with it is none of your concern, so piss off." He waited for Mycroft to reach the third step down before slamming the door closed. Then he reached into the cupboard for the pills his therapist had just put him on - antidepressants or anxiety relief or something - and took two. He watched the second hand on the clock make a few laps around, and then made his decision.

The cemetery wasn't at all what John hoped it would be - dark, damp, depressive. No, the sun was shining and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. He wandered through to the only grave of interest to him. Paranoia made him look over his shoulder to make sure he was alone before he spoke.

"You bastard," John muttered. "You selfish bastard." A rustling in the trees was the only response. "You knew I was soldier, of course you knew. You knew I'd lost people - friends, dying right in front of me as I stood there and could only hope for the impossible, unable to do a thing to stop the inevitable despite all my training - and then you think you've got the right to do this? Can I just ask you something now - was it really that bad? Was it really that fucking awful, being you?" He tried not to let the tears come through, but they did. "You didn't even tell me. I thought - I thought you trusted me. Dammit, Sherlock, didn't you trust me? Just enough to say something was wrong. I'd've thought that a man would be willing to tell you what sort of shit he was trying to sort through after living together for a year, but apparently I was wrong." He looked down and saw that his knuckles were white around the cane. "And... And I didn't see any of it."

He let the sentence hang in the air, weighing down on his shoulders as well as those of anyone within a few hundred paces. For a long time, he just stood there. His nails dug into the palm of his hand until he thought he might start drawing blood, and even then he only slightly loosened his fist. A bird landed on the tombstone in front of him. He had to fight the urge to throw something at it, or shoot it, simply for being there, for interrupting the moment and desecrating the place. When it finally left, after what felt like hours, he bit his lip to hold back another outburst - or maybe another sob, he didn't know which. "I didn't see any of it," he repeated, this time clenching his fist until he did draw blood, until he did feel the warm, sticky blood trailing down the lines in his hand. The red stained his fingertips as he marched out of the cemetery, as quickly and purposefully as he could with his limp worse than ever, and blind to everything but the gravel road leading to the gate.

If he hadn't been so blind, he might have noticed the figure standing behind one of the trees he passed. He would have recognized the figure, even if it no longer wore the long wool coat or the blue scarf or the smart jacket, having traded those in for more common clothes. And he might have noticed the look in the man's eyes. He might have known what it meant.

Stage Three: Bargaining

Three months after The Fall

John sat alone at his kitchen table. He swirled the spoon idly through the bowl of soup in front of him, watching the steam rise. Occasionally, he took a sip. But then it got to be too cold and he pushed it aside.

His phone jerked him back to the present moment with a shrill beep. He jumped, then remembered his appointment. Therapy on Thursdays. Business as usual.

Ella didn't press him when he arrived. They sat in silence for a minute or two, as they had done every week since John had started showing up again. This time, however, John was the first to break the silence.

"It's my fault."

She looked up from the clipboard on her lap. "What is?"

John sighed. "Him. Jumping. It's my fault."

"No, of course it isn't." As expected, she was prepared to do anything to make sure he didn't leave thinking that. At least not to such a degree that it may be harmful to him or those around him. "He called you, didn't he? Nothing you could have said would have changed his mind, John."

He tapped his cane on the floor anxiously. "No, but... I should have noticed something. Anything. There are signs, aren't there? Warning signs of suicide? Why didn't I notice them?"

Ella saw that nothing she could say would help at the moment. Let him vent and get it out there, she figured, and then try to help.

"What is it - drug abuse, risky behavior, mood swings, anger, feeling useless, that sort of thing? They were there. The nicotine, the cocaine. Even if I never saw him using it. And he was so... impulsive. A case would come up and then he'd be running off to meet a suspect, or getting in a cab with a homicidal maniac. He'd go from the high a case always gave him to dead silent and dead tired in a matter of minutes, sometimes. Or tell me to piss off and throw insults around if something didn't go one hundred percent according to his master plan, even if I'd had nothing to do with any of it."

She waited a moment to make sure he was finished before responding. "Did you talk to his brother about any of this? From what I've heard, a lot of that was just how he was, wasn't it?"

John scoffed. "As if Mycroft would care. You should have seen him at the funeral - he just stood in the back the whole time, didn't say a word to anyone and left before it was over. But that was just the Holmes way." He paused. "He hardly ever mentioned his family, but when he did - well, I don't think they were going for model family of the year, and his mum and dad weren't about to win any awards. More the 'take the money and go away' type." He let the sound of pen scratching paper fill the room for a moment. "If - if he wasn't - " he tried, "I - I would notice this time. And I wouldn't have let him keep up the drug habits - screw his mind palace, they were hurting him." He looked over at her. "He just wanted someone to listen to him, understand him. Didn't he." A question that came off John's tongue as a certainty. "Because he grew up a freak, and no wonder, with a mind like that. But no one ever gave him the attention he needed. I could have, and I didn't. But I would, really. I would."

"I know it hurts, John, and I know you want him to come back, but no amount of bargaining or promising on your part can make that happen. Right now, the best you can do is accept that, and know that he didn't want you to do this to yourself. He would have wanted you to move on - not forget him, of course, but keep moving through life, don't you think?"

He seemed to have missed her statement. "I would do anything to bring him back," he tried to say. But his voice cracked over the words and the words were lost to a puff of air. His mind finished the sentence for him. "Anything at all."

Stage Four: Depression

Eight months after The Fall

There comes a time in each person's life when they begin to wonder if it wouldn't be better to never have loved at all than to have loved and have lost. John was reaching this point.

He felt that numbness would be better than this gaping whole, this void, that was making itself known in his life. Numbness is neutral. This emptiness was anything but.

John thought back to Sherlock and what he had given as his excuses for drugs and smoking - clarity, he'd called it. The drugs cleared his mind. Allowed all but what mattered most to wash away. In Sherlock's case, what mattered most was the science and logic, and what was washed away was the emotion. Perhaps John could achieve the same results - the clearing away of emotions that were hurting him so.

Hurting him? Yes, hurting him. His limp was worse than it ever had been before he'd encountered Sherlock's genius. He'd lost his job because he couldn't help but remember the man, and as such was living off of - what? Someone's charity? God knows he couldn't remember the last time he'd paid the rent or touched a credit statement. (Mycroft, came the whisper from the back of his mind. Of course it was Mycroft.)

John pulled himself out of his chair and limped into Sherlock's room. He hadn't moved a thing since the funeral - though he had stepped in once in a while to remember even what he couldn't dare to - so there was a thin layer of dust covering every surface. He made his way to the bed and used his cane to pull out a box from under it. He had always known it was there, of course, but he'd understood Sherlock's reasons and trusted him enough enough that he hadn't ever done anything with it. A sigh escaped him as he sat himself on the edge of the bed and set the box next to him. Here was as good a place as any, he figured.

And so it was John Hamish Watson came to be mimicking the process he had seen Sherlock go through just once or twice before. Tourniquet, needle, arm. And it did exactly what he had hoped it would.

Numbness.

Clarity.

Bliss.

Stage Five: Acceptance

Two and a half years after The Fall

He had a new job now. Not that he had to work today or anything, it being Christmas Eve and all.

He stood in the front hallway, door wide open to the street outside. Snow fell to the ground in thick clumps. Christmas lights and decorations hung outside buildings and light posts. Mary would be over shortly for dinner, but he had something to do first.

He put a box under his arm and stepped out for a cab. He had made the same trip dozens of times before, but there was something different about it tonight.

The whole cemetery was blanketed in a thick layer of snow. He could hardly see, even with the occasional light posts inside, but he knew the path well enough.

He stopped in front of Sherlock's grave. "Well," he started. "Two and a half years." He fiddled with the box in his hands. "Her name's Mary. It's been a little over a year, and we're going to start looking at rings soon. She's nice. Journalist. Crime stories, mostly." He chuckled. "Like me, I suppose. Anyway." He set the box next to the gravestone. "Happy Christmas, mate." And then he walked away.

And if he had stayed a bit longer? He might have seen someone approach the grave and stoop down to pick up the box. He'd have seen them open the gift and take out the skull inside. He would have heard them laugh. And he would have seen the look in their eyes, a horrible mixture of pain and remorse and loneliness and relief.