Author's Note: This has been writing itself in my head for a very long time. Over the past few days, it started clamoring to be written down. This is my best approximation of that story. I do not own the BBC's Sherlock, although I continue to love it despite the heart-wrenching pain it puts me through.

In the end, the only thing that matters is how we are remembered.

I will always remember him as the best and wisest man I have ever known.

I will always remember him.

—John Watson

In all the years he had lived at 221B Baker Street, John Watson had never once turned off the lights downstairs before he went up to bed. He honestly couldn't remember a night since he had first moved in when Sherlock hadn't been awake as he trudged his way up the stairs towards the bedrooms. When he really thought about it, he wasn't really sure if he'd ever seen the man actually sleep. He was always moving, always thinking, always doing something. Stillness was a completely alien concept to one such as Sherlock Holmes. To be kind to his flatmate's odd hours, John always left the light on. Without fail, the light would be on when he descended the stairs in the morning.

He had a sneaking suspicion that it had never once been turned off.

This couldn't be happening.

"I'm a fake."

"Goodbye, John."

John held the phone to his ear, too numb to do anything but splutter as he tried to force the words out of his mouth. No, he wanted to shout, no, I don't know what you're doing but you're lying, you're lying to me, Sherlock, I know you are, I just don't know why you're doing it, why are you doing this, Sherlock, why are you doing this to me—

Something inside of him was clenched, clenched so tightly he couldn't breathe. He tried and tried and tried to speak, all the while feeling that inside him, something was clenching, something was cracking, something was breaking—

Something was breaking.

Someone was falling.

A painful ache swelled in his chest and he began to run as he had never ran before, hurtling towards the building as a scream was savagely ripped from his soul.

"SHERLOCK!"

He remembers feeling nothing. Staring out at the world passing so rapidly in front of his eyes, and feeling nothing. Like he was living in a dream, like all he had to do was to squeeze his eyes shut and open them again and he'd be waking up in his own bed. There were too many lights, too many sounds. Far, far too many people. There was just too much around him, too many things distracting him from the feeling that was rising up from deep inside.

He put his head in his hands and began to laugh. A high-pitched, crazed sound that tore its way out of his throat and shook his entire body. He was only dimly aware of a crowd of paramedics clustered around him, barking out harsh commands. He could only laugh and laugh until the tears streamed down his face.

He had failed. He hadn't saved him. He couldn't have saved him.

He was alone.

The nightmares came back with a vengeance the first night he returned home.

He hadn't dreamed with such intensity for months, but there he was once again, standing on the road, unable to move. Watching him fall. Over and over and over again, he watched as the greatest man he had ever known spread his arms wide and deliberately toppled forward into thin air.

And he could do nothing but watch as the scene replayed itself in his head.

Sometimes he watched from his own body on the ground. Other times, he had a bird's eye view of the body as he plummeted, an angry knot of limbs and flapping fabric, towards the unforgiving ground.

On especially bad nights, he saw the impact.

Every time, he woke up screaming.

One week later

There were two things that stood out in his memory about the funeral. The first was the sheer number of people that attended. The church, randomly selected (probably by Mycroft, which likely meant that it wasn't random at all) was filled to the rafters with people. The force from Scotland Yard, people whose cases Sherlock had solved, fans of his work, and many more. Even after everything, the lies and slander and deception, there were still so many people.

There were too many of them. None of them understood. They didn't get it, not at all. They didn't know who Sherlock was, what sort of a person he had been. Had been. He had to get used to saying that. Sherlock was a thing of the past, now. He was a was, no longer an is. The world held no Sherlock.

The world was empty to him.

Absently, he wondered when he had become so possessive of Sherlock. It didn't take him long to realize the answer was simple.

Always.

The second thing was Mycroft.

John had been sitting in the first pew of the empty sanctuary long before the service began, looking like a ghost that had been unceremoniously stuffed into a black suit. His eyes were blank and stared straight ahead, doing everything they could to avoid looking at the coffin. It was closed. Mycroft had asked him (though he didn't quite know why) whether he had wanted it open or closed during the service, and without hesitation, he had said flatly, "Closed."

It wasn't Sherlock. Not anymore. The bashed and mangled thing inside the coffin wasn't Sherlock. Sherlock was all brains and energy and thought and light and brilliance and rampant arrogance and dashing about and inappropriate glee and genius and all those maddening little things that made him wonderful. All that was gone.

In the midst of his daze, Mycroft had snuck up on him. John had looked up to find Sherlock's elder brother standing next to him in the chapel aisle, with what looked like the closest thing to emotion that he had ever seen on the face of a Holmes. Out of courtesy, John stood to greet him. It was the first time he had actually seen him in person for weeks.

"Mycroft, I—" He was abruptly cut off.

"I don't have much time. I diverted all surveillance from this area for two minutes exactly," Mycroft said in a rush. When John started to ask why, he was met with a firm shake of the head. "John, listen to me. I need you to hear this, and I need you to understand." He dropped his umbrella heedlessly to the floor, and his hands came up and grasped John by his shoulders. John took a step back in surprise, but Mycroft followed.

"You did so much," he said passionately. "You changed him, when we thought he was lost to us forever. You made him different. He listened to you. He cared for you. You made him want to do what was right, instead of what he thought was right. I never imagined anyone could do that to him, but you did." He stopped, and drew a ragged breath, and John almost thought he spied the beginnings of—were those tears?—in his eyes. "You made him better than he was. He was great, but you made him good. You made him whole. And for that, I am so much more grateful than I can ever say." He shook John by his shoulders, his hands tightening into the fabric of his suit. "Thank you, John Watson. You did more than the impossible. You brought him back. To us. To me. Thank you."

Mycroft released John from his grasp, picked up his umbrella, and without another word, walked from the sanctuary, his back unbowed.

But this is my fault, John wanted to scream at the retreating figure. I did this. He did this because of me.

It was much later before he realized the full import of Mycroft's opening words. He had diverted all surveillance from the two of them, alone with a coffin in a cold sanctuary.

He hadn't wanted anyone to see him cry.

Three months later

People said he had been holding up remarkably well, given the circumstances. They didn't quite understand.

John Watson was a soldier. Soldiers did not let themselves be emotionally compromised. Soldiers did not cry.

And up until exactly three months after that day, that statement held true.

But it's the little things that hurt the most.

Upon urging from Mrs. Hudson, he had begun to try to tidy things up around the flat. He hadn't touched a thing in all the time he had been there, preferring to leave the stacks of paper and odd bits of evidence and experiments exactly where they were. It made it easier, in a way. That way, he could at least pretend that he wasn't alone.

Things were always worse when he was alone.

He closed his eyes as his hand touched the dusty wood of the door to Sherlock's room. He hadn't dared enter it since he had returned to the flat, battered and bandaged and still in a state of shock three months ago. With a sharp intake of breath, John twisted the knob and stepped in the room.

Immediately, his senses were assaulted with Sherlock.

Everything in the room looked like Sherlock, felt like Sherlock, reminded him in all the small ways of the things that had made up Sherlock. The worst part, or perhaps the best, was the smell. Faintly dusty, like wool and old papers or old bookbinding glue, with the undercurrents of something vaguely spicy paired with something faintly sweet and faintly bitter. It was the smell of Sherlock, the smell John inhaled every time he swished by in his long black coat, the smell that told John everything was right with the world.

He inhaled it, nostrils flared as wide as they could go, trying to catch every last whiff before it was gone. As soon as he opened the door, it had begun to dissipate and was fading fast. He inhaled again, and felt something lurch within his chest as he realized it was barely there.

Then it was gone.

Something raw and dark and ugly clawed its way up from the pit of his stomach, and emerged from his mouth as a stifled sob. With a convulsive motion, he tried to hold it back, force it back, keep it at bay. It was relentless. It was overwhelming. It threatened to break him.

He collapsed on the dusty bed and, for the first time, let himself go.

John Watson, soldier, broke down and wept.

The time passed slowly on his own. He had once said to his therapist, long before anything ever began, that nothing happened to him anymore. He had long since stopped returning her calls.

His prediction was only now coming true.

He got up every morning, went to work every day, came home every night. He would sit in silence in the sitting room for an hour or so, and wearily trudge upstairs to bed. Every day was the same. Nothing ever changed.

His life had become his way of grieving. What little left that could be called a life was empty and flat. There was no light in his life, no laughter. There were no tears. There was only nothing.

He would have bad days, days where he felt an immeasurable weight pressing down on his chest, making it hard for him to catch his breath. There were days where he would walk through life, feeling nothing at all. The most notable thing he felt was the absence of feeling. It was as if he had lost a part of himself so great that he could never heal the wound. It would scab, and scar, but never heal. There would always be a hole.

A heart cannot survive for long without a body.

Two years later

John sat in his chair by the window, as he did every night. He was holding some patient notes he had made earlier in the day, but wasn't even trying to keep up the pretense of looking at them. Instead, he was gazing at the skull, still keeping watch from its perch on the mantle.

"I still miss you, you know," he said conversationally to the skull. "It still feels strange to me to come home to an empty flat." He sighed and ruffled the papers back and forth. He had been having conversations with the skull more and more often as time went by. It was an excellent conversationalist, anyway.

"Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to you if I hadn't come along," John said, as he put down his patient notes and picked up the evening newspaper to scan the headlines. "I wonder if you'd still be here, messing about with your experiments and driving people mad with your brilliant mind. Probably. Maybe. I don't know." He closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the chair.

"I miss you," he said again, quietly. "It's been two years. And I still miss you. Silly of me, but I do. I can't help it." Even more softly, he added, "You should still be here. You should still be alive. But you're not, are you? You're...you're dead. You're...dead. You're dead, Sherlock. And I'm not." He smiled, a cheerless grin that did little more than bare his teeth. "Isn't that funny? This time, the sidekick lived but the hero died." He paused as the grin faded. "But you would have appreciated being called an antihero more than a hero. You always hated that word. You tried to tell me so many times you weren't a hero." He closed his eyes and shook his head at himself. "I didn't ever listen."

The clock struck the hour in the hallway and John suddenly realized it was getting very late. He sighed and tossed the paper down beside him, then stretched and stood up. Walking over to the mantle, he rested one callused hand on the smooth surface of the skull.

"I wish you were here," he admitted. He stood over the mantle for a long minute, then drew his hand away as he walked towards the door. "Good night, Sherlock," he called over his shoulder.

When he reached the top of the stairs (seventeen steps, he remembered, as Sherlock had told him once and he would now never forget), he paused. He looked down the stairs behind him, into the still-lit living room. Something inside of him, so small and crushed and broken for so long, finally crumbled into dust. He closed his eyes and, with a small breath, started to let go.

"Good bye, Sherlock," he whispered brokenly.

And for the first time, he turned out the lights.