After their first meeting (the first in over a year and a half, she reminds herself) Thompson isn't sure what to do. She knows that she misjudged John Watson during their previous sessions (that much was obvious when he didn't come back) and he stopped coming soon after meeting Sherlock Holmes. The first she heard of John for months was a newspaper article about the Net Detective. After that, she had checked his blog and even in his writing she could see the change. There was no way she could or would ever condone him running around, following an apparent sociopath and chasing murderers, but she had to admit it was helping him. But now Sherlock Holmes was dead, a fraud to the world and a hero to John Watson, and John was making a second appointment in as many weeks. Now she was worried, more worried than she had been when she'd read about him being strapped to a bomb.
The second session is followed by a third. And a fourth and a fifth, another and another. Thompson still can't say she has John Watson's measure, can't say that she knows why he comes because she knows they aren't making the kind of progress that would indicate that he was getting over his flatmate's death. They do some talking about how he is feeling at every session and how Sherlock's death is still affecting him does come up every now and then. At one point, she even manages to convince him to move out of 221b Baker's street. But their discussions are short, almost as though he is merely obliging her before he moves onto what he wants to talk about. And the move doesn't even last a week before he moves back into Baker's street. How he affords it, she doesn't know and he doesn't say, muttering something about the government when she asks.
For the most part his sessions are about Sherlock. They fall into a routine, John talking about the consulting detective, telling her every last detail about the cases they worked (or rather, cases Sherlock worked on while John stopped members of the Yard from punching him and talked him into breaking his deductions down) and she just sits and listens, posing questions often enough for him to know she's listening and taking notes the whole time. At first it's all their big cases like the taxi driver who was poisoning people and Jim Moriarty, who went around strapping people to bombs. The stories he's put on his blog, the ones she has read about. But soon they move past those and John is telling her about increasingly smaller cases, relatively speaking. (She makes the mistake of describing them that way once and he is very clear that they aren't small because Sherlock didn't take the small, boring cases.) Cases like the missing soccer player and the one about the missing bride. Thompson listens because it's obvious enough that that's what John wants and asks questions and against her will, she finds herself admiring the deceased detective as well. He might have been a right bastard but he could join the dots no one else.
The fact that she no longer sits through the sessions thinking about how Sherlock must have planned the crimes completely skips her mind. Somewhere along the line, she's adopted John's belief that Sherlock Holmes was the real deal.
Soon John seems to run out of stories because he's repeating cases. It's at this point that she finally works out why he's here, why he keeps coming back. Why he closes his eyes to talk, why he leaves his cane at the door when he enters the house, why he moved back into Baker's street. Because he isn't just telling her what happened, isn't just detailing these adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Because when John Watson closes his eyes, he can pretend that Sherlock Holmes is still alive, that he didn't jump off a hospital roof. John can pretend that when he goes home there will be some horribly mangled foot in the fridge and new burn marks over the table and a squashed eyeball or three in the sink. He'll be able to walk up the stair of 221b Baker's Street without his cane and there won't be milk in the fridge but there will be a sociopathic detective on the couch or running around the flat with a scalpel in his hand. Recounting these stories allows John to pretend that his life is still crazy and dangerous and unpredictable and the best time he's ever had.
Finally she speaks up. One session (she's lost track of how many they've had by now) nearly three years after Sherlock Holmes' death, when John finishes his latest recount of the case of Baskerville's hound, she leans forward and asks him if he understands what he's doing. It gets her a confused look but underneath that, she can see he's afraid of what she means. Carefully (if she isn't careful, John will just walk out and not return again) she reminds him that Sherlock Holmes is dead. He is dead and John needs to understand this because he cannot spend the rest of his life reliving the past. He needs to learn to move on. To his credit, John doesn't walk out on her or shout her down. He just looks her in the eye and tells her that he knows what dead is and Sherlock, brilliant, miraculous, idiotic Sherlock Holmes is not dead. And she's about to try and talk him out of this delusion he is feeding himself (because John is a sensible man when faults are pointed out) but they run out of time and he leaves.
Their next appointment, John doesn't show up. If she's honest, after the way their last session ended, she'd expected that. What she hadn't expected was a letter left on the doorstep, addressed to her. In it there's a photo of Sherlock Holmes, looking even thinner and paler than his press photos. There's a nasty bruise forming on his cheekbone and he's looking incredibly disgruntled at whoever is taking the photo. There's a brief letter from John telling her that he wouldn't be seeing her anymore. (She doesn't agree with this decision. Once the shock of Sherlock's return wears off, inner turmoil is going to hit him worse than a bullet.) There's no 'I told you so' but she reads it in between the lines.
She can also read in between the lines of John's blog when Sherlock gets back into business. After the first new entry in almost three years, she can almost hear the criminals of London cringing in fear. Then there's a note about how John almost got mauled by a dog because a certain idiotic consulting detective doesn't mention there's a pit-bull puppy in a suspect's yard. Followed by an update to announce that he'd adopted the puppy and named it Gladstone and how Sherlock was not happy. In all of this, Thompson reads the subtext and she knows it wasn't just Sherlock Holmes who'd died when he jumped off the hospital and it wasn't just the consulting detective who had come back to life.
A/N: First Sherlock fanfic. Reviews and critic are welcome. Flames will be forwarded to Moriarty.