A breath of air rattled through the graveyard, blessing John Watson's bare cheeks with something that finally made him believe that he was actually alive. A perfect slab of black marble was embedded in the ground before him. It was a melancholy, yet so-beautiful-it-hurt-to-look-at-it sight. He upturned his collar against the wind, but folded it down again when he realised that that was what the man in the grave before him had always done.
It had been five months. Every single minute had been agony in the first two, but more recently he felt numb. As if he was the dead one and he simply hadn't realised. People were ignoring him. Harry; well, that wasn't a surprise- Harry usually ignored him. Mycroft ignored him. Molly. Ms Hudson had even begun to slip away, growing tired of John's depressed, self-pitying stupor.
He may as well have disappeared forever.
Along with the great Sherlock Holmes.
"You've ignored me too, huh." he spoke to the name engraved in gold on the headstone. He put his hands in his pockets and nudged a clump of grass with his foot; trying to be as casual as he could. Trying to be strong- but strength was not something he had at that point. He was weak, helpless. If Moriarty were to magically reappear then John would have been dead meat.
Pathetic.
Stupid.
He would hate to see you like this.
Voices in his head, scolding. He tried to argue but didn't when he realised that the voices were just him with this ridiculous guilt.
The guilt that if Jim did return, John wouldn't be able to so anything whatsoever. He wouldn't be able to avenge Sherlock's death.
"I asked one favour of you, and you fail me." His voice cracked, his eyes closed. Tears slipped from beneath the lashes as escapees would slip from a prison at night. He barely noticed them until they dripped onto the scarf.
The scarf.
He didn't call it his because it wasn't. It wasn't John's scarf, it wasn't John's coat, it wasn't John's violin. Sherlock, the uncaring man that he was, had die- left intestate, so, by default, his estate-little of it as there was-had gone to his closest-and possibly only- family member, his brother.
Who had given it to John.
And John wasn't sure whether he was happy about this, or if it just dragged him down further.
"You're still dead." he whispered, shivering involuntarily from the pain and the cold. He had refused to remove the scarf; even when inside, even when sleeping, even when Ms Hudson scolded him for his obsessiveness over the item. Only when he showered did he remove it; and even then he left it, carefully folded, on the side by the sink, so it never really left his sight.
He grasped one end of it in a tightly clenched fist.
"Only ever care about yourself, don't you?"
He couldn't.
He literally couldn't anymore.
"Selfish, stupid, fucking brilliant idiot, you."
John Watson was a broken man.
And there was only one person who could fix him.