Yes, I should be updating my other stories, but I got more than a little distracted watching Sherlock, leading me here to write a short drabble-thing set in the final episode, The Reichenbach Fall. This one is around the time of the actual fall itself and from John's POV, though I may come back and write one from Sherlock's POV as well. In any case, please review because that really does motivate me to write and update more often!
Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock or its characters (obviously) because if I did, I wouldn't be here writing this while waiting impatiently for Season 3 to air.
It all happened in an instant. One moment he's telling me to look up as he stands on top of St. Barts. The next he's telling me none of it's real; he's a fake and the bloody tabloids were right all along. Another and he's throwing the phone aside and stepping off the building as his name ripped raw through my throat, vain attempts to make him hear me. But that was the end, and all I did was stand and watch.
Goodbye, John.
The words – his words – echo in my ears as times slows down around me. Sounds become distant, the cries of surprise and shock existing as though in another world. Something rams into me as I fall to the ground, a movement I never registered until the touch of cold, wet pavement stings beneath my cheek, sharp and biting.
But my fall was not the one that worried me. A crowd had gathered by now, people gawking and staring at the man apparently proven to be a fraud, the man who created Jim Moriarty to further his own fame. The huge pain in the arse who somehow became my friend and was, despite his own and everybody else's objections, the most human person I'd ever known, if only in his own way.
"I'm a doctor," the words spill from my lips, mumbled and half-hearted, meant only to part the spectators who stood to hide him from my sight. Fumblingly, I reach my hand out to grasp at the still-warm wrist, resisting from surveying the rest of the scene or laying eyes upon the dark crimson spreading across the pavement, because that only might prove this really was the end of it all. No, I couldn't let myself think that way for it couldn't be true. Sherlock was far too stubborn to die; true, he loved risking his life and all just for the fun of it, but the lucky bastard somehow always knew he'd get out of it perfectly unharmed. And this time could be no different; there just had to be proof of that.
But there was none. No pulse, not even a weak one, beat beneath my desperate, searching fingertips, no matter how hard I concentrated on finding one, how hard I hoped for one to be there. I let my hand fall, useless, as others gripped my shoulders and pulled me away, out of the way of the paramedics who lifted his limp body onto a stretcher hastily, a pale arm hanging lifelessly over the side.
At that point, as the stress and anxiety of the past few days hit, only augmented by the fresh wave of loss, I could do little more than watch on helplessly the proceedings that continued. It was all I could do to try and plead, almost argue again the way we always did, with him in the last moments before his body disappeared into the van.
Just stop it. Don't you be dead. Don't you dare be dead.