Author's note: The second and final part of this fic. This is the story of the last chapter, told from Sherlock's point of view. As always, I don't own the BBC's Sherlock, but I do love it and I do appreciate any sort of feedback you can provide. Thanks for reading.
One more thing, one more miracle, Sherlock, for me. Don't be...dead.
He wasn't.
His brain was still racing; his heart, or what was left of it, was still beating. But there was something inside of him, something he didn't quite understand, that was no longer with him.
He watched John walk away from the grave—his grave—back straight, gait steady. Carrying on, like the soldier he truly was. Standing tall while internally, everything crumbled. His name, that familiar, beloved name, rose unbidden to his lips, but he held it back, sinking his teeth into his bottom lip in the effort to stay silent. He could not call out. He could not tell him. As the coppery blood he had drawn flooded his mouth, he knew. He had to die.
He closed his eyes and felt himself fade into the shadows.
Sherlock Holmes would be no more.
Sherlock had never been one for turning off the lights.
He slept so infrequently, and kept such odd hours when awake, that he had early on deemed it quite impractical to spend the time switching lights on or off. During the short time he had lived on his own in 221B, he didn't turn off a single light. Once John had moved in, he had made slightly more of an effort to turn lights off as he left rooms, but rarely remembered. The living room lights had only been off once that he could recall, and that had been when one of his experiments had ended up reacting negatively with the power grid of the building.
A few days after his "death," he had been unable to resist walking by Baker Street one last time before leaving the country. It was stupid, and unsafe, but he didn't care. Hidden beneath newly ginger-colored hair and a bulky hooded sweatshirt, he gazed up at the flat as he passed, smiling without joy at the light streaming from the windows.
John had left the lights on.
One week later
Sherlock was in Spain when he first heard the news about his own funeral. Predictably, he saw it in the tabloid carried by another passenger on a bus. When he picked up his own copy, he was amused to see that it had, in fact, been very well attended. Apparently some people don't really care how fake they say I am, he chuckled to himself. The grin that had been forming on his face stilled and died as he caught a glimpse of a small blurred figure in the corner of one particular photograph.
It was impossible to distinguish the face, but he was of medium height, clad in a dark suit, and averting his face from the camera. He was leaning on a cane.
The paper lay in a tiny crumpled heap on the cafe table as the man in the long coat strode away.
Three months later
He had, so far, tracked down thirty-four members of Moriarty's gang and ensured their capture. World travel was becoming boring, as he crossed Europe time and time again following each strand of the web. A few he had himself brought to the police, and one he had personally brought to justice. Quite literally, in fact. He had been one of Moriarty's snipers. Specifically, Moriarty's London snipers.
Sherlock had taken great pleasure in bashing him unconscious.
There was nothing, no one else, for him now. Nothing but the hunt. Nothing but the next strand, the next chase, the scent of blood. He could not afford to be distracted. The body he inhabited was just a fragile shell, containing a burning mass of determined focus. He would succeed. He would. He had to.
But sometimes, when he lost that focus, he went back. Back to London, back to where it all began. Back to see the reason why he was fighting, why he was running. Why he was dead. But he forbade himself from anything more than simply watching. He had to be very strict with himself about that.
Sometimes it was hard.
Soon after he had left England for the first time, he had quietly bought the flat across the street from 221B. It had remained empty since Moriarty had planted those bombs so long ago, and the owners were only too happy to get it off their hands. Naturally, they had no idea who the buyer really was. Mycroft had been most accommodating in that regard.
He would sit in the dark, empty room, and watch through the window. Watch the rooms where he used to live, and watch the only man in the world he trusted. Just to sit there, in silence, and watch, was torture enough. But he wouldn't have traded it for the world.
He had traded his life to keep this man safe. He would trade the world to ensure that safety.
Two months after buying the flat, he hacked into Mycroft's surveillance systems. It was strangely comforting to him to hear John's voice, even emanating from a set of cheap speakers. Mycroft would have scolded him, had he known. Sherlock didn't care. Just to hear John, to close his eyes and imagine he was speaking to him, imagine that everything was still right with the world, was enough.
He had been undeniably startled when John actually had spoken to him one day.
After an initial moment of stunned panic, he knew he had been wrong. John hadn't been talking to him. Not really. At least, not the him that was sitting in the rooms across the street from 221B. No, John was speaking to another Sherlock. A Sherlock only he could see. And for the first time, Sherlock felt a pang of something he didn't recognize. (It couldn't be emotion, he told himself rationally. Emotions are useless. I've deleted them. No, it couldn't be that.)
John was speaking to Sherlock.
He whipped out his phone before he realized it and had dashed off a text to Mycroft.
Look after him, will you? -SH
He was already out the door before he got a response.
Of course. -MH
It was little consolation. The damage had already been done.
He ran through the darkened streets of London, fleeing something he didn't yet understand. As his feet slapped the pavement, one thought rang through his mind:
John, what've I done to you?
He lost himself in his work.
Man after woman after man fell into his traps, and he kept working. He barely slept anymore. Dark circles etched their way under his ice-blue eyes, and made his face their permanent home. He rarely ate. It didn't matter to him. None of that was important anymore.
The web had to fall.
He had been foolish enough to allow himself to care. And since he had absolutely refused to abandon his foolishness, he was determined to see the web crumble, man by man, until it was no more.
He had sworn he would keep him safe. And he would do anything, everything, to make sure of it.
It only took a visit to London to remind himself of that. It only took one visit to remind him of the pain.
The pain of being away from London was nothing compared to the pain he felt as he sat, an invisible observer, in the empty room. As he watched the man who he, the great Sherlock Holmes, had dared to care for, and in caring, had destroyed. And he could do nothing to save him.
I'm coming, John, he promised silently as he watched the broken man pace back and forth across the room. I'm coming home. Soon. As soon as this is over. As soon as you're safe. Only when you're safe.
I promise.
He would make this right.
Two years later
He had been in London for a little over a week, as his quarry had fled there after evading Sherlock's initial trap. No matter. He would be caught soon enough.
His London visits had fallen into a sort of pattern. Every night, as he returned to the empty flat, he left the rooms dark and switched on his equipment to hear the familiar sounds of John puttering around the flat and talking to himself.
Sherlock had taken to responding to his one-sided conversations. He figured it was only fair. After all, John spoke to the skull because he had no Sherlock. Sherlock spoke to the silence because he had no John.
He put his headphones on.
"I still miss you, you know," John admitted from across the street. "It still feels strange to me to come home to an empty flat." It couldn't be any stranger than to be eavesdropping on a conversation in which you were technically a participant. "Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to you if I hadn't come along," John continued, and Sherlock saw him pick up the newspaper from beside his chair. "I wonder if you'd still be here, messing about with your experiments and driving people mad with your brilliant mind. Probably. Maybe. I don't know."
"Oh, John," whispered Sherlock to the silent room. "I would be dead without you. Truly dead." I wish you knew that.
"I miss you." John's voice cracked audibly, even through the speakers. "It's been two years. And I still miss you. Silly of me, but I do. I can't help it."
"And I you, John."
"You should still be here. You should still be alive. But you're not, are you? You're...you're dead. You're...dead. You're dead, Sherlock. And I'm not."
"Not for much longer, John. Once this is over, I won't be dead any more. I promise."
"Isn't that funny? This time, the sidekick lived but the hero died." John stopped speaking, and Sherlock rubbed his aching eyes with his fingers.
"You were never just my sidekick, John. Never. You have always been more than that. And I was, and am still, not a hero."
"But you would have appreciated being called an antihero more than a hero. You always hated that word. You tried to tell me so many times you weren't a hero. I didn't ever listen."
"I'm not a hero, John. I never was. I'm just a man. A brilliant man, but a man all the same. Nothing more."
Across the street, John stood and walked over to place his hand gently on the skull, resting in its familiar place on the mantle.
"I wish you were here," he said once more. Sherlock watched as he stood over the mantle for a long minute, then turned and walked towards the door. "Good night, Sherlock."
"Good night, John."
He pulled off his headphones, and his hand hovered over the switch. John had gone upstairs, and Sherlock knew from experience he would hear no more tonight. Still his hand lingered, unwilling to turn off the equipment. It was stupidly sentimental, he knew, but every night it grew more and more difficult to switch it off. With a small exhalation, he shook his head in exasperation at his own stupidity, and drew himself up and out of the chair to gaze out the window at the golden light streaming from the windows of 221B. He smiled at a sudden memory, but there was no joy in his face. John still left the lights on, even after all this time.
A muffled whisper came from the desk and he whirled around in alarm at the sudden noise, but no more sound issued from his headphones.
When he turned to face the window once more, the sitting room was dark.
John had turned out the lights.
He frantically rushed over to the equipment and jammed his headphones back onto his head, hurriedly rewinding the tape. What had he said? Why had John turned out the lights, now, after two years of still leaving them on, as he always had? Why?
He caught the whisper and rewound, increasing the volume as high as it went. As the words became audible, he felt like someone had punched him in the chest.
"Goodbye, Sherlock."
John had said goodbye.
He fell back into his chair, his hands automatically steepling together and coming up to touch the tip of his nose, his fingers resting gently on his lips. He closed his eyes slowly, as if even that small movement pained him.
John had said goodbye. To him. To Sherlock. To the one man who cared enough to die for him, and couldn't even tell him so.
He was well and truly alone.
Though no man could see it, a single drop coursed its way down the cheek of the world's only consulting detective.
In a broken and shaking voice, he whispered, "Goodbye, John."
There were no lights left to turn off.