Title: I Saw His Face

Author: Still Waters

Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)

Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock. Just playing, with love and respect to those who brought these characters to life.

Summary: There was a man across the room who was about to propose. Until an oddly persistent waiter demanded his attention. (Outside POV on John and Sherlock's reunion at the restaurant in TEH)

Written: 3/15 – 3/16/14.

Notes: This was one of those out-of-the-blue ideas that swiftly gained a narrator's voice and was subsequently written in one sitting. I wanted to write the restaurant scene in "The Empty Hearse" (minus the part at the end with John attacking Sherlock) from an outside POV of someone sitting in the restaurant that doesn't recognize either of them. Martin Freeman's acting was exquisite and I wanted to explore it further. As the POV character developed in my head, I realized two things: that he would be observing the scene without hearing any of the dialogue, and that this piece was to be written in first person. I think this is the first time I've ever written a story in first person POV – it was a bit nerve-wracking, but it's the only way this tale would tell itself. As always, I hope I did the characters justice. Thank you for reading and for your continued support. I cherish every response.

As a young man, I was shot in the back while serving my country. Ever since then, I've only sat at corner tables in restaurants.

As an old, wounded soldier, corner tables give me the ability to have my back against the wall where no one can shoot me in it. Again. As an old man celebrating his wedding anniversary, they afford me privacy and intimacy with the woman I love.

And this year, as a widower in a room full of couples and mates, they give me space to reflect on years of blessings and a clear view for people-watching should my thoughts turn dark and require distraction.

So it was, with a bittersweet smile, that my eyes were drawn to the man across the room who was about to propose.

He wore a dark suit and a moustache with the discomforted hope of a man who grew it to distract others from the sadness in his eyes. There was a steadiness in his bearing, a controlled measurement to his breathing, despite his nervousness, that I immediately recognized as military. And when he took the box out of his jacket and placed it on the table, he sought proper placement with several precise twists of his left hand - which, despite his anxiety, didn't shake at all.

I took another forkful of pasta as the young lady in the purple dress returned to the table and he slipped the box back into his jacket pocket. I shivered as the silver chain around my neck shifted and reached for an itch under my bowtie. I could hear Miriam's smiling lilt as I dressed this evening; feel her hand on mine as I tied the knot despite her insistence that I hardly had to dress smartly to impress her.

Not now, not ever, my love.

Clearing my throat, I watched the man begin his proposal. I was across the room and my hearing isn't what it used to be, but my eyes are as sharp as ever. I watched those sad eyes look up and down from her with a hope for a brighter future; watched a man who had clearly seen battle and hardship sweetly fumble for the right words – a gentleman looking to do it right – and watched the young lady, who clearly knew what was coming, as she gently teased him, not making it easy.

Poor bastard, I thought. When I had stumbled through my proposal, stomach knotted around a fortifying sip of champagne, Miriam had laughed and put me out of my misery, interrupting with a delighted "yes!" before I ever got the question out properly.

The waiter returned with the champagne at exactly the wrong moment. I watched the young lady cringe good-naturedly; watched the man tactfully try to send the waiter away. But the waiter was oddly persistent, requiring the man to finally look up.

And suddenly, all the air went out of the room; the frozen look on his face as painful as a bullet to the back. As painful as losing your soul mate to something as innocuous as a slip and bump on the head.

All of my attention was rooted to that table; an island of emotion to which the rest of the room seemed oblivious. The man stared at the waiter for a few seconds, completely taken aback, face shuttering and hardening. When he got to his feet, his fists were clenched as tightly as his breathing was working for control. He was struggling to look the waiter in the eye – glancing at him, then having to look down and away, unable to keep the contact. When he did make contact, though, the pain was astounding. While he looked at the young lady as the future, he looked at the waiter as a future long since lost.

It was when he sought the waiter's face through a head still half-bowed, eyes raised up nearly to their limits, that I had to cover my sobbed cough with a hasty sip of water. For in a brief flash of a second, the man looked like our old Bess – a hound dog Miriam and I had rescued in our forties from the poor excuse for a human being who beat her and chained her outside in all manner of bad weather. It was the sad, raised eyes she turned on us when we returned from work those first few weeks – the plaintive, silent words of a loyal, faithful dog turning to its chosen family with raw, innocent hurt: what did I do wrong to make you abandon me like that?

The waiter was talking. The young lady was talking. But the man didn't say a word. He drew himself up from where he had braced on the table and continued trying to lock eyes with the waiter. His face was all hard edges, a stillness of unforgiving stone broken by heart-wrenchingly expressive eyes. Eyes of betrayal, grief, loss, and overwhelming pain. Eyes trying to understand, to make sense of what he was seeing. Yet for all their depth, for all the obviousness of these two men's connection and history, there was no warmth there – no surprise, no joy. The man looked at the waiter like one seeing death where a living man stood.

For all Lazarus may have risen, the funeral was still too fresh.

The waiter was trying to make light of something, and the man's face made a barely perceptible shift into dangerous, carefully restrained anger. It was within that anger that the man locked his attention fully on the waiter's face. While struggling with a range of emotions just moments before, he had had to look away, but with the onset of simmering rage, frightening in its stillness and silence, he fearlessly focused it on its instigator.

The waiter tried for another nervous joke as he rubbed at his upper lip with a moistened napkin and the man's eyes narrowed, lips twitching as they struggled between breaking sobs and what would be a very frightening, thin-lipped smile of expertly contained rage. The young lady was gesticulating around the waiter's continued actions, but the man was still silent. Still processing. A volcano with a churning underbelly that everyone hoped would settle down if only they kept talking over its subtle warnings.

But the volcano demanded its voice be heard; one of those painfully clenched fists coming down hard on the table. The left one, the dominant one. The one with the watch that had marked the time since whatever had led to this confrontation.

Too many words. Too many emotions. Too much pressure. The volcano was about to release and demand its respect.

When the man finally spoke, I couldn't hear the words. But I didn't need to because I saw his face. Saw him bowing his head again as emotions beyond anger pulled his eyes away from the waiter. Saw him struggling to speak, words cracking in his throat, breathing sharp and heavy and desperate for a control that years of breathing exercises fought to reassert. Shaking and bowing his head as he looked for understanding, answers, control, a way around the churning in his head and gut. His chest heaved with the effort of it all, walking the thin, wavering line between visceral, angry betrayal and raw, stomach-emptying sobs.

I knew that man. While I didn't know what had brought him there, I knew that face intimately. Just over a year ago, his face was mine; his stuttered breathing, his tears and rage and struggle for control, for sense, for a reason why...he was me sitting in a hospital bed, recovering from surgery after fracturing my hip, listening to my son tell me that my beloved Miriam had tripped on a rug at our flat and hit her head. That by the time he went to pick her up to come see me, she had been bleeding into her brain for too long, the damage too severe. It was my face sitting in a wheelchair at her bedside in intensive care, sobbing and raging and praying all without a sound, tears streaming down my face as I tried to say goodbye to my heart without my voice wavering, because I didn't want her to hear me crying the last time she heard me speak. Didn't want to worry her.

It was my face when, still holding Miriam's hand after she took her last breath, I looked up at the misty-eyed nurse and asked, "why?" As if she could somehow tell me where the world had gone so wrong.

The same "why" I saw forming on the man's lips through the warring emotions, the ingrained attempts at disciplined posture, the ragged breathing masking echoes of dark nights and darker thoughts, of therapy breakthroughs, of love and friendship suddenly reduced to a body in the ground, ashes in an urn.

I couldn't watch anymore.

Desperately forcing back the tears blurring my vision, I hastily put money on the table, not trusting myself to speak long enough to ask for the check. Leaning heavily on my cane, I hurried to the door, gasping in a breath of cool night air as soon as it hit me. Despite the ache in my hip promising a rainy day to come, I started walking instead of hailing a cab. Miriam and I had a tradition of trying a new restaurant for each anniversary; she'd enjoyed this one so much last year that she'd wanted to come again for our 64th.

With a small locket of ashes under my shirt, I'd made sure we kept our date.

Why?

Because despite the pain, I had made my peace with not having all the answers; chose to focus on what I did know instead – that Miriam was not only the love of my life, but also my best friend. I was lucky enough to find both of those qualities in the same person. Some people find them in two different people. Some never find them at all.

As I wearily climbed into a cab several blocks later, I hoped the man in the restaurant would find some of the peace I had with time. Because despite all the conflict I'd just witnessed, I had seen love and friendship within the young lady and the waiter; love and friendship for the man whose mustache couldn't hide eyes cautiously longing for both after a barren stretch of isolation.

Because if he had the chance for two people with both qualities? Two Miriams?

Well, then he was truly blessed.

And I'd be the first to tell him so.