It was only a glimpse, a small little detail that grabbed John's attention and pulled him into a pool of familiarly heart wrenching emotion. He was walking on the street, as was normal, when a taxi sped by, stopping for just a moment at the curve in the road. The moment was long enough for John to peer in through the window and see a mess of dark curls, a coat with its collar folded up and the glimmer of blue-gray eyes. He could feel his breath hitch as his cane dropped to the ground, forgotten.
Sherlock was back. Sherlock was in that cab, ready to open the door and envelope him in those lanky arms of his. John could feel it and before he knew what he was doing, he found himself running toward the cab, all sense of composure gone. The only thing trailing through his mind was I don't have to go back to the flat alone today. For the first time in three years I will be able to walk through the threshold with Sherlock Holmes. My best friend.
As daydreams go, this one was stunningly vivid, so much so, that when the cab increased its speed down the road, John kept running. So caught up in what he thought he saw, it never even registered to him that he just might have mistaken a sharply dressed Londoner for the great Sherlock Holmes. No, that thought never crossed his mind as he ran down the road after the black cab. He ran, watching the car slowly grow smaller as it sped through intersections and over crosswalks. He ran on, still convinced that his friend was in that cab, on his way to Baker Street, going home.
Just for good measure, though, he called out, "Sherlock!" When the figure in the back of the cab turned, John felt his heart stop. He was too far away to see the face of the passenger, but he could feel Sherlock's gaze lock with his own. Without realising it, he had stopped running. He just stood there, dumbly, in the middle of the street, staring after the cab until a car rolled up behind him and honked in annoyance.
In his excitement to move out of the car's way, he didn't notice the man hanging back on the pavement, a .32 revolver hidden in his coat pocket.
221B was exactly where Sherlock was headed, interestingly enough. He, however, had picked up on the Moriarty-hired assassin lurking twenty or so feet behind John and knew what would happen if he made any attempt to contact his old flat mate. The war wasn't over yet.
He leaned forward and spoke to the cabbie calmly. "There's been a change of plans. Take me back to Heathrow."
John ran the whole way home. He hadn't felt this much energy since he had been handcuffed to Sherlock the night before… before what? Obviously Sherlock hadn't died, but he had fallen from an impossibly high place. He had questions, but before all that, he just wanted to be around Sherlock, to breathe him in and look at him as he had been deprived of for the past years.
Oh, he couldn't wait to be home.
He barely stopped at the door when he arrived, just bursting right through it. Right up the stairs he went and almost kicked down the door to their flat. And there he stood, his eyes closed, unable to open them for whatever unknown reason. No violin was played, though, and no biting words emanated through the air around him. The flat was as quiet as it had been since Sherlock's departure. Tentatively, John opened his eyes to find that the flat looked as empty as it sounded. He found his legs were no longer doing the job he desperately needed them to, and he sunk to the floor, filling the silent room with the sound of his lonely sobs.