Chapter 2: The First Sign

"Are you home already?" asked Olivia from the kitchen when John closed the door behind him. She was washing up, but turned the water off to come and greet him in the door.

John kicked off his shoes and hung the jacket on its peg before giving Olivia a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek.

"I thought you were going to the shops after work?" she asked when she noticed that he hadn't brought any bags.

"Oh, sorry, I completely forgot. I've been a bit preoccupied today."

"I'll say. You acted weird all morning." She smiled warmly and gave him another kiss on the cheek. Suddenly he felt that it was the best thing, not to tell her about Sherlock. This was what he wanted, to move on with his life as though the time with Sherlock had never happened.

"What's for dinner?"

Their Brixton flat wasn't nearly as nice as the one he had shared with Sherlock on Baker Street, but it was starting to feel like home. He no longer reacted at the smell of the place when he walked through the door. Not that it was smelly or anything, it was just that it hadn't smelt like home in the beginning. It had smelt like when you went to a friend's house: not in any way unpleasant, just strange and unfamiliar. But Olivia had really helped to make it feel more like home. During the year John had lived there by himself, he had never bothered about pictures on the walls, curtains or things like that. But when Olivia moved in, it felt like he'd gotten a reason to really get his act together. She had made him establish a façade of normalcy, a façade that was now beginning to be dismantled as his actual return to normalcy was built up behind the scenes.

She did the sweetest things that really made the place feel like home, probably without even thinking about it. On the worktop next to the sink where she was doing the washing-up, she had put a wok they never used and filled it with the unripe tomatoes from the balcony, insisting that they would ripen in the sun, even though it was the end of October. She'd insisted on covering the balcony with tomatoes and strawberry plants, the same way she had covered most of the windowsills with potted flowers. She liked gardening, and John found it endearing.

One window he had asked her to leave empty, though. It was the one by the kitchen table, overlooking Lambert Road and the tarmacked playground of the school on the other side of the street. This had become John's spot. There he would sit and appear to watch the world go by, while he was actually far away in his mind. As long as he every now and then commented on something or other going on in the street below, he was left to his own devices. Olivia got worried if he shut himself in the bedroom, so he didn't do that anymore.

"Are you working tonight?"

"Sorry. What? Working. Yes," John stammered, brought back harshly to reality.

"Do you want me to make you a sandwich?"

John blinked, forcing himself to focus on the real world. He had completely forgotten the tea, which was now stone cold in front of him.

"Yes, that'd be lovely," he said and tried to muster a smile, but couldn't really manage it.

"Are you that tired, darling? Are you really sure you should go to work if you're so tired?"

"I'm fine," John insisted. "I just need a power-nap."

He got up and tipped the tea out in the sink on his way to the sitting room, where he stretched out on the sofa.

The power-nap turned into a proper nap, and Olivia shook him awake at seven, with a cup of tea in her hand. She really was a sweetheart. John didn't know when he had had to make a cup of tea for himself in the last couple of years. He drank it so quickly that the burns on the roof of his mouth still hurt when he put his white coat on over his scrubs and entered the A&E of University College Hospital.

Molly had said that she was sure to be able to find John a job at St. Bart's, but John hadn't been able to go back there, not since Sherlock's jump. He had, with the help and support of his therapist finally accepted that it was a jump and not a fall. But he still couldn't imagine seeing that building and walking that pavement where it, no, not it – the suicide, John corrected himself – had happened. No, it was actually his therapist who had set him up with this job. Apparently she knew someone on the board. Damn, she had really gone out of her way to make sure John got his life back on track.

The job wasn't exactly exhilarating, but at least it was more exciting than work at a clinic. Mondays were usually the worst, when he shared shift with a triage nurse who especially disliked him, and he gave her a loathing look as he passed. She was the reason his Mondays (and Wednesdays and every other Friday, for that matter) felt like a constant line of sutures. Today she had really outdone herself though, by sending through a woman with heartburn.

He was muttering under his breath as he contemplated all the horrible things he wanted to say to her (but never would) on his way to the break room, when something caught his eye. It was something he hadn't actually seen, but rather just reacted to, like when a single word sticks in your mind after just surveying a room and you can't tell where you saw it. The door to the trauma room was still swinging slightly from whoever had gone in, and John moved closer, just in time to see the EMC-team give up the attempts to resuscitate the young gun-shot victim on the gurney.

John edged into the room when the initial commotion had calmed down, and the EMC-team moved on. There was something about the dead man in the middle of the room that seemed so desperately familiar, he just couldn't place it. For a second, the cropped hair made him think of the army, but he could feel that it wasn't right. Also, it did not look like this guy had been in the army. It wasn't the bomber-jacket he wore over a band t-shirt and jeans. John even leaned forward to look at the shoes, which reminded him of the time he had closely examined a pair of sneakers with Sherlock, looking for poison. At the thought of Sherlock, John knew immediately what it was that had caught his attention. The scarf! He had barely noticed it before, but now it felt so obvious. It was exactly the same as Sherlock's had been; he would have been able to pick it out anywhere. What were the odds? He even let out a small laugh. How many times hadn't he had to pick that damned scarf up from the floor, or the chair, or the bathtub? When he reached up to touch the fabric, he realised that his had was trembling ever so slightly.

As he felt the soft, worn fabric against his fingertips, he felt almost as though he was touching Sherlock. He immediately took a step back. But the thought was already planted in his head. Touching Sherlock. He remembered with horrifying clarity the last time he had done that: while trying to take the pulse of a limp, dead wrist.

"Keep it together, Watson," he ordered himself under his breath as he felt his knees wobbling dangerously under him.

"Are you feeling all right, John?"

It was one of the nurses. They'd spoken before, but John couldn't remember her name. Hell, he barely even remembered his own name at the moment.

"I just…" John heard himself stammer. "I thought I knew him. My mistake"

He managed to keep it together until he got to the break room; managed to keep the images that were burned into his brain at bay until he closed the door behind him and turned the lights off. But then he was in hell.

However hard he tried, all he could see was Sherlock's dead, pale eyes as the blood trickled down into his face. Oh god, the blood. The blood running down the cracks in the pavement, Sherlock's hair sopping wet with blood, blood pooling on the ground.

John could feel his body grown numb and give way under him, but for the short moment he slid down the wall, all he could see as the darkness closed in on him was the sight of Sherlock falling face-first towards the street below, and as he slumped down to the floor, what he heard was the sickening thud of a human body making contact with asphalt after a long fall.