Title: "So Human as I Am"
Author: AStudyInTeal
Summary: ["Sherlock is numb as he stares down at grave before him. He doesn't know what he feels, staring down at the grave marked John Watson..] After John dies from cancer, Sherlock is left reeling in the aftermath.
Inspired by: "Alone on the Water" by MadLori. (Duh.)
Warnings: Major Character Death, (Brief) Graphic Depictions of Violence, and Serious Angst
"I tried to live alone but lonely is so lonely, alone
So human as I am, I had to give up my defenses
So I smiled and tried to mean it, to let myself let go
'Cause it's all in the hands of a bitter, bitter man
Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in
Take a bow, play the part of a lonely, lonely heart
Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in
To the world you thought you lived in…"
~ "Any Other World", MIKA
So Human as I Am
Sherlock is numb as he stares down at grave before him, as a coffin is lowered into it, as slightly-damp soil trickles through his fingers.
He doesn't know what he feels, staring down at the grave marked John Watson.
"How long?"
"Two months. Maybe less. The last few weeks…won't be pleasant. In the hospital mostly, on morphine and unconscious for a majority of the time."
The detective almost doesn't attend the funeral. Despite the low regard he had for funerals, he couldn't bring himself not to go.
It is Harry who gives the eulogy. She's his sister, after all. She talks about John's bravery and loyalty, his compassion and determination.
Sherlock listens and hates every moment of it.
She may be his sister, but she never understood John. She doesn't know his love for danger, for adrenaline. His ordinary brilliance. His love for tea and that it became his habit to make two cups rather than only one. His preference for jumpers because they were comfortable and functional, could hide a gun, could withstand the rigorous use he put them through. His continuous stream of girlfriends, most lasting no more than a month, only a handful making even six. His constant need to help people and the pained look his face gets when they failed to help a client or save a life. His forgiving Sherlock after he'd faked his death five years ago. His extraordinary tolerance for experiments in the fridge, for violin recitals at two in the morning, for running across London after criminals; for Sherlock in general.
These are the things the detective thinks of while Harriet Watson spoke.
Despite all this, Sherlock seems to be considered the chief mourner, the widower, the bereft man. Throughout the service, it is to him that other attendees cast pitying, apologetic looks. It ss to him that sympathies were given.
The funeral itself is well attended. Harry is all that was left of the Watson clan, but John had knit together a family of his own through his friends and acquaintances. Mycroft is at Sherlock's right, as if he wanted to be certain his younger brother did not intend to throw himself into the grave in some fit of misery. Mrs Hudson isn't far off, sniffling into a handkerchief. Lestrade stands nearby too, grieving but solemn. It looks as if all the women John had dated—all their names deleted from his mind—are all in attendance. Several people Sherlock observes to be from Bart's, old friends of John's from medical school, linger near the back. To their left is a smaller group that seemed to be his former fellows-at-arms, before John had moved from the Afghani battlefield to the London battlefield. More than half of Scotland Yard seems to be present as well, in respect for the doctor who had reined in their eccentric consultant. Officers and representatives from a variety of organizations and offices are scattered throughout the mix.
Sherlock ignores their tears and pitying looks, their speeches and words, their sympathies and well-wishes. It's all irrelevant and immaterial.
The only thing that matters to him is John, being lowered into the ground.
"What's the prognosis, John?"
A cheerless if wry smile. "What, no deductions?"
"John."
A sigh. "It's terminal, Sherlock."
A pause, unsure of what to say. "How…how long?"
"Not very."
He doesn't know what to do once John tells him. He doesn't know what to say.
He can't find any words of apology or sympathy to say. Those don't matter because John wouldn't want them anyways. Words of comfort elude him.
'I'm sorry' is pointless.
'It'll be okay' is a lie. Because no. No, it wouldn't be okay in any possible way. What possible future without his flatmate, his Boswell, his friend could ever be okay?
What can he say?
What does one say when their dearest friend informs them that he has only two months to live?
At John's insistence, they continue normal life as long as it was feasible.
They take three cases in as many weeks before Sherlock declares he isn't accepting any more. John sighs and merely updates his blog with his accounts of the three. He had quit his job at the clinic immediately after the news.
To John, it seems like Sherlock hasn't slept at all recently. The detective has been sure to wake before John and only allowed himself to slip into sleep once his flatmate was unconscious.
Sherlock isn't going to allow himself to waste any time left with him.
Once, Sherlock took various drugs in an attempt to block out the overload of input his mind provided him with, constantly barraging his mind with knowledge he did not always want.
He had sought out oblivion.
He just wanted to feel nothing at all.
He found that numbness years later when he lost John.
"I'll miss you, John."
John smiles tightly at the eccentric man he's come to befriend. "I know, Sherlock. And that is the biggest regret I'll have. Leaving you."
Mycroft visited Baker Street a week after the diagnosis, grim-faced.
He gave Sherlock and John a few forms each.
"Power of attorney agreement?" Sherlock asked, reading the papers.
The elder Holmes nodded. "I offered my assistance to John, to make sure they were air-tight, just in case anything happens." He turned his omniscient gaze to the doctor. "Don't concern yourself with any medical or funerary expenses."
John didn't bother argue with the man. "Thanks, Mycroft. I owe you."
"No. I am merely settling an old debt."
In the end, the doctors do what they can, but they can't do much. Sherlock argues with them until they allow John to return home, where he can be more comfortable.
The detective is all but attached to John's side.
"Sherlock, it's okay to leave the room without me," the blogger chuckles. "I'm not going to expire on the couch while you get tea."
Grey eyes turn to him, awash with the emotions Sherlock is holding in, not allowing himself to give in to them. "I don't want you to die alone."
John holds his gaze for a long moment, choked on the words he can't say. Sherlock can read his face clearly anyways.
Silence says more than words ever could.
It ends almost two months precisely after John's diagnosis.
Sherlock sits at his bedside that night, for the twelfth night in a row, sleepless for his vigil.
Since the former army doctor had been put on painkillers, his sleeping habits had been altered. Part of it, the detective assumes, is the illness itself.
"Sherlock?" John slurs suddenly in the middle of the night.
The detective grasps his searching hand. "I'm still here, John."
John squeezes his hand as tightly as he can, though his grip is weak. Perhaps, Sherlock thinks, it isn't him that John is reassuring was still here.
Despite himself, he can find no words of reassurance or comfort to give his friend. Because things will not get better, this will not be okay, and John won't be fine. There is nothing he can say.
He wants reassurance himself. He wants to shake John until he promises not to leave. He does not want to be here. He wants to leave. He does not want to sit here, unable to do anything to help his best friend as he laid dying.
There is a pain in his heart, throbbing with its steady beating. It feels like it is being ripped from his chest. Like it is being burned out of him.
He is losing his best friend. In all his life, this is the worst thing he has ever experienced.
Sherlock holds John's hand in both of his. "I'm here," he repeats."I'm here."
As the doctor slips back to sleep, Sherlock stares at and studies his face, memorizing it for the permanent folder in his mind labeled: "JOHN WATSON – DO NOT DELETE".
An hour later, when his chest stills and the hand in both of Sherlock's goes limp, only then did tears finally fall down Sherlock's face as sobs wrack his body.
It's over. It's all over now.
It doesn't matter.
John Hamish Watson
Doctor, Soldier, Blogger, Friend
If anyone at the funeral finds it odd that John is buried next an empty grave, no one says a word of it.
To: DI Lestrade
It might do my brother good to have a case.
From: DI Lestrade
I thought it'd be best to wait, to let him mourn.
To: DI Lestrade
He is still mourning, yes, but when won't he be?
It is four months after the good doctor's passing that Sherlock finally returns to work.
He had spent the time since the funeral ghosting in the flat, haunting it like an apparition, surviving off tea and nicotine patches and the occasional biscuits that Mrs Hudson brought up.
The detective still feels numb as he crosses the police cordon and approaches Lestrade, who had called him to the crime scene. Donovan is beside him, glancing away from Sherlock uneasily. No one seems to be able to meet his eyes except the DI, whom he addresses.
"What have you got?" he asks stoically without introduction.
While giving him the briefing, Lestrade studies the detective. Sherlock is thinner and paler than his drug days. Greg wonders if he'd even left 221B in the past three months, since he'd last seen him.
(He hasn't.)
Donovan follows when he leads Sherlock to the master bedroom, where the bodies were found. Sherlock studies them and, for a moment, almost seems normal again until he straightens.
He looks to his left, mouth open—but falters as the "Jo—" leaves his mouth. He coughs, wilting slightly, and for a moment he looks like a child lost in a department store.
Lestrade realizes, looking at Sherlock after the man finished reciting his deductions, that the man is still in shock from John's death. His heart aches at the thought that the detective needs a blanket for shock now.
"I never thought it'd end like this," John said quietly, late one night.
Sherlock frowned. "With cancer?"
"No. Leaving you."
In the days after John's death, Sherlock lives with Mycroft, unable to bear being at Baker Street for the moment.
He's in shock, Mycroft supposes. Sherlock would never stay with him otherwise.
DI Lestrade visits the day after. Mycroft overhears part of their hushed conversation.
"Is this how he felt?" Sherlock's voice is small in a way Mycroft hasn't heard in decades.
The older man pauses, confused. "What?"
"Is this how he felt when he thought I was dead?" Sherlock asks.
Neither Mycroft nor Lestrade can think of a response.
"If you don't stop prying…I burn you," Moriarty promised beside a pool. "I will burn the heart out of you."
Sherlock was unfazed. "I have been reliably informed that I don't have one."
The criminal looked to John with a grin. "But we both know that's not true."
It's months later than Sherlock realizes that he doesn't feel numb.
He feels empty. He feels like someone has carved into his chest and scooped out everything in there, taken away his heart—despite that the metaphor is nonsensical.
A cancerous growth had done what Moriarty and all of his vast influences could not.
"I always thought we'd be doing this til we either got killed on a case or were old and grey and could retire. Have bees in Sussex like you've mentioned."
Sherlock flounders, having no words. He's wondered for years now if his little hope might be possible, that John would stay with him for that long.
"'M sorry," the blogger adds softly.
"John, I…I don't know what I will do after…after."
He laughs slightly. "Take cases, I assume."
The detective does not share his chuckle. "It won't be the same."
"Same as it was before we met."
Sherlock shakes his head. "Nothing will ever be the same."
Ten months after John's death, Lestrade gets a call from Sherlock.
The detective had been after a murderer who'd done a runner and, as the DI realizes too late, had gone after the criminal himself.
After five minutes of flying through London's traffic to the intersection Sherlock had barely managed to enunciate, Lestrade finds the man in an alley off to the side, on the pavement.
A few feet away is the murderer, apparently unconscious and looking beat up and bloody. A gun lay near his hand. Most pressing about the scene, however, is the crumpled consulting detective on the pavement, coat fanned out around him, blood covering his shirt.
"Sherlock!" Lestrade yells as he went to the man's side. Sherlock is barely conscious, but began speaking. He only catches John's name in the slur of words.
After fumbling to call for an ambulance while pressing on the gunshot wound, Lestrade realizes what the detective was saying.
"The game is on, John..."
It's less than a year after John's funeral that Mycroft finds himself attending yet another.
This one is his brother's.
Despite his initial doubts, the funeral is just as well attended as John's. Mrs. Hudson, DI Lestrade, what is surely more than half of the Metropolitan Police, innumerable clients, members of his homeless network, and others Mycroft does not recognize.
Though he grieves for his brother, Mycroft's eyes are dry. Sherlock is dead, but at least he's no longer a lifeless wraith haunting an empty flat.
There is finally a body beneath the obsidian black gravestone that merely reads Sherlock Holmes. Beside it is a white marble stone that bears John's name.
Mycroft lingers at the gravesite until he is the last.
Despite himself and his policy against sentiment, the government official smiles at the pair of graves as memories blind him momentarily.
Of a lost and wounded soldier without a cause. Of an uncontrollable detective that stopped for no one. Of the two broken men meeting and becoming whole together.
Of watching the pair of them walk away from the crime scene that first night, bonds of friendship cemented in place so quickly.
The words come with a nostalgic smile.
"Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson."
The last time the detective visits John's grave before he is buried beside it is a week before he receives his final case.
The cemetery is deserted.
Had someone been present, they might have seen the broken detective slump to his knees on the ground before the grave. The slump of his shoulders spoke of defeat.
He drew in a shuddering breath, staring at the tombstone.
"I can't do this, John. I...I can't," Sherlock admits.
"I'm lost without my blogger."