A/N: So I wrote this ages ago, after I watched the Reichenbach Fall and forgot all about it untill i found it today... enjoy and please please review!
"I'm a fake.
"Sherlock –"
"Goodbye, John."
He stretches out his arms and his recognisable, almost iconic silhouette of the tall, thin figure with curly hair and long coat is branded against the sky for a moment, before it falls.
"SHERLOCK!"
Falling.
Falling relentlessly, inevitably, inescapably. Dizzyingly. It feels like a punch in the gut, seeing the helpless shape falling over and over. Panic screams in his ears but at the same time, everything is silent – like screaming into a bottomless cavern. The world seems to hold its breath... and yet it's over in a flash. The juxtapositions mirror the impossibility of a vulnerable, defeatable Sherlock.
Suddenly he's running; he's on the ground; he's running again. His head hurts but it doesn't matter. All his attention is on a huddle of people on the pavement outside the hospital.
"I'm a doctor, let me come through. Let me come through please!"
People are holding him, trying to stop him. They don't understand. Sherlock... Sherlock could never die. Sherlock is brilliant and infuriating and impossible and he could never... ever...
He feels for the pulse. It doesn't come. Then someone turns Sherlock over, revealing a pale, bloodied face with cold, sightless, terrifying eyes.
John lurched awake. Panting heavily, he brought his hands up to his face as the grief washed over him once more. Taking deep breaths, he tried to slow down his breathing. Shivers racked his body and he could feel where the sweat had dampened his clothes. Even in the darkness, Sherlock's sightless eyes were blazing before him. It was as if they were etched onto his eyelids; every night they stared out from his dreams.
"You've got to come to terms with it," his therapist had said. "You've got to accept that he's not going to come back before you can start to heal."
But he had come to terms with it. He had been forced to by seeing Sherlock jump off a building, seeing the blood on the pavement, and those haunting eyes.
He's not going to come back. John had been messed up by Afghanistan: seeing his friends die was bound to do that. It had haunted his dreams when he first came back – no wonder he had found it hard to trust. But it made civilian life so monotonous and futile. Then Sherlock came along: ingenious, bizarre, exasperating Sherlock, and life had not been dull. At first John had been intrigued, then exhilarated, but it hadn't taken long before it was an emotional pull. Sherlock might have been an arrogant... sod... sometimes, and he might have pretended he didn't have a heart, but underneath all that was the greatest man John had ever known. His flaws just proved that he was human – the most human human being. And he had given John his life back. John had healed and starting trusting people again, and life had been better than it had ever been. Until everyone had stopped trusting the person he had put his faith in. His closest friend. And now he was gone forever, leaving John alone.
His eyes began to sting as tears pooled up. He had had to move out of 221B. It had been too much, just looking around the flat and seeing the mess, or the chemistry equipment, or the violin... and remembering that Sherlock really was never coming back. Everything he saw triggered some memory of Sherlock, and even the happy ones hurt him because they were inaccessible now – just memories that would dance tauntingly just out of reaching distance. For every memory, Sherlock's absence wrenched at John's insides, clawing out every joyful part of him and flooding the space with pain and despair. By now he was drowning.
Even if it wasn't for the pain John wouldn't be able to let go, because he didn't understand. Why had Sherlock jumped? Because people thought he was a fraud? But he had told John himself that he could use the computer key code to destroy Rich Brook and bring back Moriarty. And why would he carefully arrange how to distract John so that he could get to the roof to do something as rash as suicide? Sherlock wasn't rash; he wouldn't do anything that wasn't strategic. The only explanation that fit was the one that John would never accept. Never.
No one will ever convince me that you told me a lie.
John lay awake in the darkness long after the tears had dried from his face.