Colorblind
I am colorblind
Coffee black and egg white
Pull me out from inside
I am ready, I am ready
I am ready, I am fine.
- Counting Crows
London used to be colorful. No, really. Cities aren't all concrete and asphalt, you know, and English skies aren't always slate grey. There's Regent's Park, for an obvious start, and the neon lights of the bars in Piccadilly, and the striped awnings of nearly every café and sandwich shop in the city. Sherlock claimed he could deduce the exact quality of a London eatery based on the coloration of its awning. He'd written up an explanation on The Science of Deduction, but all the talk of subliminal pattern association had been beyond John.
And now all the colors were beyond John, not just the ones on the sandwich shop awnings. He knew they must still exist and that other people could probably see them, but he definitely could not. The world, since The Incident, registered in rain-washed greys, each shade blending, bleeding into the next. Except blood was red, John remembered. He didn't see red. Not anymore.
The colors in the flat fled first. The space Sherlock had inhabited, the things he had touched, became lifeless and drab without the prismatic pulse of his presence. Without his bare feet pacing, wearing threadbare patches into it, the red patterned carpet faded to rust, to brown, to the color of lead. Without his restless fingers toying with dishes, pens, books, their colors leeched into formerly rich wooden surfaces which had dimmed to the color of ash. Without the occasional fist or bullet sent through the wall during the agony of boredom, the paint and paper dissolved, the pattern dribbled away and the walls became one blank expanse like a sullen sky that refused to snow. In order for your eyes to register color, there must be a light source and the light that had illuminated 221B Baker Street had been extinguished.
John almost couldn't bear it when the colors started leaving the flat and he had nearly moved out until he realized that it was happening everywhere else, too. Hadn't the lights atop cabs once been yellow? Cabs reminded him of Sherlock so on bad days he took the Tube: white words on a charcoal bar across a smoke-grey circle. Mind the Gap. Mind the Gap, Sherlock. He remembered how, before, the greenish fluorescent lights in Underground stations had made people look ill. Now the light was grey and it made people look dead. Believe me, I would know. The formerly colored lines on Tube maps now held no meaning, as John could no longer distinguish between the shades, so he just didn't go many places these days. Work at the clinic, back to the flat, to the shop for milk and bread. The bank. Work at the clinic. It became a sort of game to guess what color Sarah was wearing.
They had convinced him that all he needed was to get away for a bit, to take a break from it all. John had let them convince him, had allowed that maybe they were right and besides, Mycroft had paid for his train ticket and his bed and breakfast stay. But it turned out that all the color had drained out of Kent, Garden of England, as well. Scotney Castle's grey stones blended into a backdrop of grey hills, grey lake, and grey skies. Try as he might to block out the memories, John couldn't help but remember that the last time he'd been in the countryside Sherlock had been with him, never mind the fact that Devon was nothing like Kent, really. Although he really was quite beastly to travel with – imagine the intent silences of a cab ride punctuated with hissed factoids detailing the sordid lives of their fellow passengers, but for two hours – John wished with every fiber of his being that Sherlock were with him. Yes, he'd find the whole tourist thing hopelessly dull and would be twitching to get back to London the entire time, but without him, Kent, Garden of England, might as well have been the Afghan desert.
In the end, John had cut his vacation short because there really was nothing of Sherlock in Kent and he could see no point of staying in a place to which Sherlock had never even been. He returned to 221B and surrounded himself with Sherlock's things, though he tried not to drown in them. He made himself leave the flat at least once every day, setting his jaw, squaring his shoulders, and Soldering On, though he stopped seeing Ella because she tried to tell him that Soldiering On was not the same thing as Letting Go. John did not want to hear it. He cleaned out the fridge, put the chemistry equipment in boxes which he shoved into the linen cupboard, and hesitated a long while before throwing out the vials and needles he found in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. But the skull stayed on the mantle, the violin stayed in its case on the coffee table, and the posters stayed on the walls, never mind the fact that John couldn't tell what colors they were anymore. Sherlock probably wouldn't have understood the sentiment behind keeping his things, but that gave John all the more reason to keep them. He worked long shifts at the clinic to cover the rent; it was only fair to Mrs. Hudson and he refused to let something as trivial as money force him out of the place in which he'd spent the best part of his life.
That part was over and some days John hated Sherlock for it. It would have been better to never realize what he'd been missing than to know and have it snatched away. When Sherlock had entered John's lifeless post-war existence, he had breathed life back into the dispossessed soldier; his exit had sucked the life right back out, starting with the colors. Sometimes when John looked in the mirror in the mornings, he could see himself actively fading into the tile behind him, becoming fuzzy around the edges until he vanished. His coloring had always been pale, though not as pale as Sherlock's: fair skin, dishwater-blond hair, light blue eyes. It was hard to remember even his own colors, which were so similar that they faded into each other worse than most. John sometimes wondered how long other people would be able to see him. On mornings like that, he gave himself a good shake and called Harry or Greg or Stamford to convince himself that he still existed.
Contact with other people helped. Ella might have told him that, before he stopped going to his appointments, but he discovered it for himself a few months after The Incident. He was having one of his bad days, a day when all the greys and blacks and whites looked almost exactly the same, when he couldn't see his face in the mirror, when he had to run his hands over and over it to be sure he was still there. But he had to Soldier On and as he shuffled down the steps in a fog, he bowled right into Mrs. Hudson. She'd been blending into the wallpaper, you see. She took one look at him, phoned Sarah to inform her that John would not be coming in to work, and sat him down in her kitchen for possibly the longest tea of his life. At first, she chatted – at him, really – about the unseasonably cool weather, the high price of stamps, the pain in her hip, and the latest on the sandwich shop owner's series of tawdry affairs. But she looked at John the whole time, only taking her eyes off him to brew fresh pots of tea, and soon, he began to feel less insubstantial. She even got him to talk about work at the clinic, about Harry, about the war for God's sake. Together, they must have drank five pots of tea and John was damned if he shouldn't have been paying Mrs. Hudson instead of Ella.
After that, tea with Mrs. Hudson became a daily ritual worked in somewhere between John's numerous shifts. They rarely talked about Sherlock or The Incident, at least not at first, but John also had fewer bad days, and on less-bad days he could bring himself to say things like, "I wonder what Sherlock would think about that case with the webcam messages." Mrs. Hudson would smile, shake her head fondly, and start leaving newspapers in his flat folded to expose the latest unsolved mystery. John thought she was probably an angel, and he thought Ella owed her some credit because those articles finally got him writing his blog again, if only to speculate on how Sherlock would have approached the case. He also began to type up old cases, details of daily life with Sherlock, ridiculous things he used to say, anything to prevent him from forgetting.
Tea with Mrs. Hudson. Drinks with Greg. Dinner in the Bart's cantine with Molly after a late shift. Lunch with Stamford. Coffee with Harry. Cautious messages from Mycroft left when he knew John was working. His blog. While they helped convince John that he still existed, they did not make him come alive or bring the colors back. John was a prism, a conductor of light, and his light source had been snuffed out.
So he woke up, went to work, did the shopping, ate with people, read the paper, typed a few lines, went to bed. Sometimes he thought he saw Sherlock in alleyways or phone booths or standing outside a streetlamp's glow, but he would blink and the figure would disappear or else turn into someone he didn't recognize. Sometimes he would visit the grave, but mostly he wouldn't. Sherlock wouldn't have wanted flowers or the sentiment behind them most likely. John had kept the flat as a memorial and it was to 221B which he returned day after day. Including the day he found the door unlocked.
He had been playing the color game on his way home from the clinic, trying to remember or guess the colors of the things he passed. The phone box on the corner was red, obviously, and the newspaper stand was blue, but the sign in the Italian restaurant's window a few doors from 221B was giving him trouble. It was probably green, but then again, it was so pale that maybe yellow was more likely. He was still debating – this was all the mystery his life afforded him now – when he reached his front door to find it standing slightly ajar. Instantly, John switched into soldier mode. With steady hands, he pushed the door the rest of the way open, careful not to make a sound. His first thought was for Mrs. Hudson and he tried her door to find it locked. He proceeded up the stairs, avoiding the creaky fourth step, and saw that his door was open as well. He pictured his gun in the desk drawer, cursed himself for a fool and, seeing nothing for it, burst into the sitting room.
And there he stood. There could be no mistake: Sherlock Holmes stood in the center of the room and he'd looked up when John barged in, was looking right at him. John's colorless vision did nothing to obscure him; in fact, Sherlock's features registered in sharp, almost painful definition. He looked no different from the first time John had met him: same impossibly lithe frame, same unruly hair, same angular face, same sardonically crooked eyebrow. That last did it for John. Ten months – almost a year! – of thinking Sherlock, the most important person in his life, was dead – had killed himself, no less, the selfish bastard. Ten months of feeling like a great bloody chunk had been torn from his life. Ten months of berating himself for daring to hope that Sherlock could concoct one more miracle, that he would even have wanted to. Now, there he stands, pretty as you please, as if waiting for John to say, "Why, Sherlock, how are you?" or possibly to compliment him on a job well done.
John could not remember a time when he'd felt so angry. Not during the war when an enemy had filled one of his mates with bullets, not when Jim Moriarty had almost blown them up, not even when the Yard had arrested Sherlock, though that last one came close. The blood pounded in his ears and his breath stilled in his chest. It would have been a perfect opportunity for time to slow, but instead, things happened rather quickly. Not yet knowing what he would do, John crossed to Sherlock in two strides, but when the detective opened his mouth to speak, John decided. Having no desire to hear whatever insensitive, insulting remark Sherlock deemed appropriate for this situation, John curled his steady fingers into a fist, drew back and hurled all his incredulity at the man's sheer temerity into a punch directly to Sherlock's jaw. His head snapped almost comically to the side with the impact, and the bemused little smile he saw on Sherlock's face once he righted himself gave John half a mind to punch him again and ask questions later. The least he could do was look contrite.
But then John saw the blood. The impact must have caused Sherlock to bite his lip because the edge of his mouth was bleeding. John watched, transfixed, as one drop trickled from his pale lips to his paler skin, spelling out the reality of Sherlock's presence in a line of brightest red.
And suddenly the colors exploded back into the world with Sherlock at the epicenter. Sherlock's eyes were two distinct shades of grey – darker on the outside and lighter around the pupil with an infinite number of shades in between – but the rest of him certainly was not grey. His skin was pale, yes, but tinted with pink, especially where John had hit him. His lips were a shade or two darker and his hair was dark dark dark brown. His coat was pretending to be black but was really made up of fibers of olive, navy, and slate. His scarf was possibly purple, or maybe dark blue. Without knowing how, John ended up with its dangly bits tickling his nose and his cheek pressed against a plum-colored shirt and firm chest with his arms tightly wrapped around his missing piece.
"You bastard," he croaked. "You utter, bloody, bastard."
Sherlock chuckled, a rich, sincere sound which reverberated against John's face where it was still pressed against Sherlock's chest. All thoughts of punching him fled and John's blood sang in response, letting him know that he was, once again, alive.
AN: I realize that in Conan Doyle's canon, Sherlock doesn't return until after three years have passed but I decided I couldn't let him be apart from John for that long. :/