[The usual disclaimers, and my profession of worshipping at the altar of Godtiss and the Moffat.]
Warning: *Spoilers for Series 1, Episode 3 (The Great Game)* ; also, britpicking on this is somewhere from uneven to non-existent.
And thanks to my wonderful beta, BigBluePudding, my own personal Watson.
John has dreams. He's always had these excessively vivid dreams, ever since he was a child, running around with Harry in the tiny backyard of their grandparents' house in Hertfordshire and falling asleep curled around quilts in front of the fireplace. He would dream of each day's events in unorthodox succession, all summarised and put into categories, at least, until the fantasy broke through and jumbled it all into music. Screeching, discordant music, sometimes, but music nonetheless. The sounds and noises he heard every day, cut and pasted into trills and patterns. Music.
That became a very, very bad thing when he went to war. The rattling of machine guns roared in his ears nearly every night, and he couldn't. Make. It. Stop. Even when he came back, it was a little buzz in the background promising pain and paranoia, even in the dull little beige life he had had then.
But now, now it's worse, worse than it's ever been.
It's silent.
His dreams don't have sound any more, no more music. John would be tempted to compare them to a silent movie, except for the fact that they aren't black and white. What he would give to not dream in color these days, because that's all he does dream of.
The storm gray-blue of the sky as the clouds swelled up to the rain.
The crumbling off-white of the old marble building, like some ruined temple.
The swirling oil-patterns of red blood, soaking into the pavement, soaking into his clothes and his shoes, into that raven-black hair...
He doesn't hear noise anymore, and he supposes that he should at least be glad that means he never has to hear that crunch, as the body hit the pavement, ever again.
John doesn't think he could handle that.
So he takes the silent technicolor dreams as they come, and if it means he wakes up every night, twisting in his sheets and trying very very hard not to cry again, there's not much John can do to fix it.
Fix it. Why didn't he think of that?
For a while he dreams in physics diagrams, angles of inclination and the Pythagorean theorem, the buildings and the pavement covered in imaginary chalk calculations. He wonders if this was what Sherlock's dreams are... were like. He can fix it this way- he can make Sherlock fall into the laundry lorry, fall cushioned by bags of clothes, no more red, no more blood. He can lower the rooftop to just above the ground, so that there's no building to fall from in the first place, no more harsh pavement, no more Bart's. He can take away the cold, unfeeling sky, just make it all go away, no more gray...
That's when he realises he's in denial. It's not a good realisation, because it makes the dreams worse than ever.
Now he's on the rooftop as Sherlock falls, arms spread out, coat caught in the wind and flung up behind him. As every single person he blames for Sherlock's dea- (he can't say that word, not here, not alone in the darkness of Sherlock's old bedroom) ...fall. As every single person he blames for The Fall comes up behind Sherlock and pushes him viciously over the edge.
Mycroft. Bloody stupid Mycroft, who's an idiot for every inch he's a genius.
Donovan. Letting her resentment get the better of her, letting Moriarty slip in.
Anderson. Just... that fucking git of a man, Anderson.
Kitty Riley. The triumphant sneer wiped right off her face when she read the papers the morning after. That had been something at least. She'd come to Baker Street, only to have Mrs. Hudson slam the door in her face.
Moriarty himself. The mantra repeats 'Moriarty was real, Moriarty was real,' in his head over and over until John gets it right. Now he can see the reptilian features clenched in fury beside the pool, at the trial, at the morgue, when John was called in to identify the body on the rooftop. (He didn't look over to the other corpse draped in white sheeting on the next table, that day he'd been called in to confirm "Jim" was gone. He couldn't, he knew that was under it, and besides, guilt-ridden-but-hiding-it-well Mycroft was waiting outside the door for his turn to do that. John wouldn't lift up the sheet. Couldn't.)
Every single one of them, , stepped up to the edge of the rooftop, and pushed Sherlock over, every night. And John watched, frozen.
Because when the night came that he himself felt his hands drawn, unwillingly, to tip, to shove, to push... he couldn't do anything to hold his traitorous limbs back. He could only stand there and watch, as Sherlock tumbled, end over end, down, down...
And see, after, his pale, cold face turned slightly up from the pavement by some stranger, lines and tear-tracts etched out in blood just as they had been those many months ago.
His eyes, open and unseeing, had held no color and no music at all.