John did not know whether it had been a week or just a few minutes. The numbness inside made him indifferent to categories like time or space. It was irrelevant. In the midst of the chaos raging inside his mind, there was only a single fact that seemed to block out all the others, large and luminous like a balloon, terrible like an army with pointed spears.
He is gone.
Reason still seemed to refuse to accept it. Somehow, it did not seem possible that he could have gone out into the night, just like that, without leaving anything behind but this terrible emptiness. One should think that the world would stop its course and the thousand worlds whirling overhead in the infinite night sky would extinguish their lights for a moment, mourning his passing. Instead, unbelievably, the world was just as it had been before. A few headlines in the newspapers, a few letters of condolences, and the busy passers-by in the street went on bustling about with their little lives and petty concerns. The world was just as it had been before, only it no longer mattered to him. Sometimes, gazing out of the window, he felt like he was watching the human species from outer space, observing and wondering what it was that they were so desperately trying to achieve. He was no longer part of it.
He is gone.
What did life matter? Had life ever mattered before he had met him? John had never been a person to have many friends. Lots of acquaintances and colleagues and… all the other meaningless words that people invent to describe a person that comes into your life and then vanishes from it again without leaving a trace behind. With him, it was different. When he first met him, in that impersonal room in St Bartholomew's hospital, illuminated by neon lights, it was at a point in his life when he had least expected to find a friend. Much less, a friend who would change his life more completely than he'd ever thought it possible. Someone who showed him a world that he never knew, someone who rescued him from his bleak and mundane existence and filled his life with meaning and a purpose. Someone who was everything he'd always longed to be, without even knowing it.
He is gone.
It was more than just a friend he'd lost. People had called them many things. Flatmates, colleagues, associates. Some, with judgment in their voices, had called them "lovers". John did not care. They did not understand, none of them did. How could they? He had loved Sherlock, though not in the sense they were implying. Still did. The connection they had shared could not be limited by those narrow definitions. Sherlock had been his brother, someone he trusted with his life. And there was something else, something John hadn't been aware of until he had been left alone with this wide and gaping hole that, at times, seemed to swallow up his whole being. Something had died inside him the day he had seen Sherlock fall from the top of St Bartholomew's. He had seen his hero fall. And it was part of himself he had lost with him.