The guilt was overwhelming.
It ate at John every waking moment-but Mycroft had specifically told him that he couldn't tell Sherlock.
Couldn't let him know that life wasn't over, that he wasn't dead...
'No man left behind' was what he'd always lived by-but now he was being forced to stand by and pretend as his best friend fell apart.
And it was because of him.
From what he'd heard, Sherlock was doing poorly: not eating, not drinking, not sleeping...
And it surprised him, just a little bit. It surprised him that the great Sherlock Holmes, the cold mind and feelingless intellect, would be so completely felled by just the absence of one person.
John, specifically.
He knew they were friends-that was an understood-but he'd never realised that Sherlock... cared that much.
And so it was a shock to the doctor's system to find that Sherlock was this messed up by his 'death.'
In a way, it was heartwarming.
In another way, it worried him to no end, and he constantly feared that the detective would be dead-or nearly so-by the time John returned.
He had, once or twice, tried to suggest to Mycroft that maybe it would be in Sherlock's best interest to have him see someone, a professional, just to... make sure he was okay. But the elder Holmes had assured him that it wouldn't work out.
He had said something about how Holmes' just didn't do that, or some similar bullshit.
He'd said it wouldn't help.
But the way things were going, John might just have to insist.