Disclaimer: This is the first fic that i've written in years, so i'm sorry that it turned out to be this horrid little thing.
As the sun begins to creep silently over the mastodon of the busy city life, he practically loses himself. He nearly forgets why and where the lines were crossed. He almost deliberately forgets himself. Slowly, with his knuckles turning white from the grip of the marble sink, he hunches in front of the bathroom mirror and doesn't seem to recall the tired face looking back at him. All the details shocking to him, almost as if that person was someone different all together; the sagging almost hollow eyes, the unshaven cheeks, the mess of wavy black hair matted down by sweat and the lines. There were millions of them. His hands start to shake frantically as he tries to focus, wanting to deny it all. His relatively black and white disorder, his so-called career and him. That man he once loved so whole-heartily for reasons unknown to himself. He doesn't exactly know what had gone on in that man's mind or if he had ever been in his thoughts and, morosely he didn't care.
Or perhaps, he genuinely believes it was best that he leaves it at that.
Within seconds, he lets himself drink in this image before him and notes on several things, such as his weight loss, which he considered to be the most troubling for the fact that he was underweight before any of this. He also took a few moments to chew over the optical illusion that was his nose and without notice, a memory bubbled to the surface almost hauntingly and he begins to laugh, but this kind of laughter only gives way to absolute despondency. He can't, even if he tried, remember anything of whom he was or why anything he had ever done should or should not be exclusively funny.
His excruciatingly thin, chapped lips perfectly formed what could have been questionable wonders and aspects. Momentarily, his left arm pivots and brings up his hand to touch the glass. His fingers trace over the outline of his mirrored self and his lips curl. "Just who are you?"
He fans out his fingers over the glass and bows forward, letting out a gigantic cough that frightens him. He desperately digs his fingers into the glass, as if he thought maybe, just maybe, he could get a grip on the surface but, obviously fails and his hand slips to the side where he clutched unto the edges of the medicine cabinet. Coughing again, speckles of blood spew directly against the glass and blood began to drip from his lower lip towards his chin. He begins to wipe the blood from his lips but in doing so, he manages to get a real good look at what he has become and realized that it was all over. "What a way to go." What a fucking way to go.
The insecurities? The acknowledgement? The sovereignty? The intimacy? Might as well leave them on the welcome doormat. He will never have any use for any of them.
He takes a small razor, the size of his thumb and hesitantly aligns it with his bone of an arm. He stabs deep into his left wrist and slices upward towards his inner elbow, trailing behind a gash that split open almost as if it were a crack on the side of a street. He winces and takes deep, shuddering breaths as he works on his other arm, leaving only selective gashes and nothing near any capillary veins. He takes another deep breath, choking from the quick rush of air trying to push through such tiny tubes. He steps back, and drags about his arm that had already made a small pool of blood below him.
The night before, he had been getting multiple calls and text messages and from the skittering dance his phone would do every five minutes, he assumed it would not cease under any condition. If he could relax and let his mind shift its gears, from the top of his head he could narrow down every single personnel who had tried to contact him, attach a list of the precise hour they had done so and the urgency of their call, but he couldn't and it scared him. It brought on fear that he hasn't experienced in so long and it gave way to the darkness that he hasn't laid eyes on since the moment that John had vanished from his peripheral.
He closes his eyes and the first thing that takes a solid form is his face. The face that takes it all in stride. The ultimatum of pride and pure intelligence; wandering bright eyes, questioning eyebrows and thin lips that curl when amused. He then sees his callus hands moving almost like magic, hovering over the spaces between them; concerned but, always accepting.
His eyes flicker as he gathers every single detail and successfully begins to reconstructs him in his mind. He remembers the moments when they had gone for walks deep within the gray fog that had made London it's home when cases were proving to be hell on earth. He remembers the lunches they've had in miniature delis, the debates they've had over minimal things, the cigarettes he had smoked in his presence, the wary expressions, the friendly encouragements, the lipstick smiles, the books, the hobbling, the touches, the kisses and the sex. Yes, he remembers the sex.
He opens his eyes wide and hectically searches for him within the enclosed space, but the reality of it all was that solemnly it was just him, alone; sitting on the sides of the blood smeared marble tub with a mauled arm, waiting for some kind of symbolic sign or for him to come in, take him by the wrists and drag him home.
Of course, 221B Baker Street was psychically just a flat which they had shared as mates. It was just a place they had made theirs on that fateful day almost six and 1/2 years ago. It was where you could see the most enchanting sunrises and the most breathtaking sunsets. It was where he could hear him hobbling and make out the rhythmic patterns of the small thuds his walking stick would make as he went on through the hallways. It was where tea was always being made. It was where stories were always being told. It was where they would lay, shape shifting through the waves of ecstasy and burning hot flesh pressing dangerously against each other in a mess of tangled limbs and desperate, yearning lips.
It was where they had begun and it was where they had ended. Tick. Tock.
He had always struggled to grasp the invisible moments that whisked before him and he knew he wouldn't be able to do this without him. He had become nothing but a dependent, empty shell and he swore that he would never in his entire life end up somewhere where he could not escape from. All he could do now was to desperately claw at the base of time to let him go back. To let him see him again and be able to experience the intensity of his care; the almost melting center where their love had burned to its full capacity for years on end. From the moment they had laid eyes on each other, they had always known.
It was fate.
He sighed deeply, letting out a grunt from the piercing pain that his useless arm was bringing on to him and swallowed the last bit of saliva that lingered in his dry mouth. Hesitatingly, he gets to his feet and stumbles over to the medicine cabinet where he gets out a bottle of sleeping pills with his decent arm prescribed to John Watson. He shook his head lightly, scoffing at the sight of his name and slightly scratches it off the label.
"Dr. John Watson, you pretentious little man…." He had said, almost laughing at his own words. They've always had this little half-baked game bent on word play where they tried to irritate the other by adding their utmost evident flaws, such as Watson being short and Holmes being a know it all, who intimidated people. But, John was always too easy on Holmes and that was one thing that he could not ever forget. He flings the bottle of pills into the waste basket next to the sink.
With a whirl, he loses his balance and plummets down onto his knees, bashing his head on the side of the sink as he went down. He falls backwards; spread eagle on the linoleum, making an S and some eerie symbol with the sanguine fluid that flowed like waves from within himself. He extends his right arm, gravely attempting to touch, to grasp, to embrace, to feel something out of the ordinary. To feel something that was not there, casted away from the untrained eye.
He thinks about God. He thinks about angels and golden gates that are forced ajar by the hour. He thinks about Mrs. Hudson and of how (maybe if luck was on his side) he could make it up to her in another life time. He thinks about his enemies and he thinks about his cases, but the numbness made it almost impossible to decipher one from another. He writhes in cold sweat, quivering from the frigidness and the convulsion of the apprehending death that would follow in any minute. He fights the sleep. He fights to stay conscious because he might as well have been wrong all along. Maybe, this just wasn't the answer he's been searching for. Maybe there was something else, somewhere else.
His eyes follow the dust cascading around the sun's light and he knows that there will never be anything else. There will always be work to do and there will always be rivals whom would drive him to the state of insanity. Those things will never change, he was quite sure of that and there will never be another life like this one. There will never be another John.
He gasps, suddenly searching high above him for any sign of sensibility and endowments, but of course there have never been any and there will never be any. The crystallized bejeweled eyes of his that lit pathways were now dull and bloodshot pieces of metal, scaring the man he once was. The man he had built himself to be. He could just imagine how pathetic he seemed to look now, lying helpless as he drained completely from his wrists and turning blue from the quakes and tears he could not help but to make.
"Holmes…" But, yes, he could remember it now. "Holmes…that was amazing!" He could remember his voice. Strong. Vital. Man. All man.
"Really? You think so?" He had said in response. Confused. Unsure of the situation. Unsure of himself.
"Of course it was! It was extraordinary! It was quite extraordinary!" He had said, almost sprinting out of himself in amazement and excitement. He has never seen anything like it, he assured. He had looked like a small child laying eyes on a marvelous magic trick for the first time and thinking of wonders eclipsed within the beyond. He remembers the half smile he had given, an ugly little thing that seemed wary and almost miserable. "That's not what people normally say."
"What do people normally say?" He remembers the concern that he had and the sensation that he had tried to comprehend. It had been one of the chilliest days of the year. But, as they sat together in that cab, the coldest air could not seem to reach them. He had eyed him cautiously, perpetrating into the void before he had the right mind to answer. "Piss off…."
And, yes, that's right. That's how it went. He remembers. John had scoffed then and gave a miniscule chuckle, which rose curiosity in him (as it always may). It was such a beautiful thing, that laugh of his. It rang through one ear and out the other, making sure to captivate every single crook and cranny of his brain. He had wished that he could remember other times when he had laughed, right up to the very end, but he couldn't and he wasn't going to pry into it any longer. The time has come to realize that he could not fight the sleep. No right man could.
With one more spasm, he half closes his eyes to make slits and pictures geometrical shapes in the spaces between light and the shadows they leave behind. He pictures himself, suspended in the moment; casually strapping his scarf around his neck and turning to consult about his surroundings as he flashes the same old cheeky smile towards John, leaving him behind with mountains of paperwork that didn't even concern him. But, John had never minded and Holmes had never insisted.
Good luck, my dear Watson, and good night.