On days like these, John wondered if life hated him. Probably with passion,because today things just piled up.

The car driver, who had seemed to develop a Red-Green Colour Blindness and nearly drove him over together with the crowd that had wanted to pass over the crosswalk. When he got into the office, Sherlock had sat onto one of the chairs in the waiting room. There had been no other people there – they had not opened at 7 AM already, so luckily no one had noticed the pointed glare he had thrown at him (or the empty chair, whatsoever). He had reappeared again, right after one of his patients left his office, coat flattering behind him, his first word being 'John' and the rest of it lost as the next man (pneumonia) walked right through him. It should probably scare him, how easily he fell back into motion again after his dead friend faded into thin air, but at that point he just could not bring himself to care anymore. Sherlocks visits had gotten more and more frequently as the third anniversary of his death drew nearer, more than occasionally claiming that he was not dead, that he was no hallucination and that he was real, his sentences being the same ever since that one night at Harrys. At first, it had been dreadfully, having to repeat to himself that Sherlock was in fact dead, having to constantly remind himself to the hurting truth, because he might go insane if he did not. However, he had gotten used to it by now.

The day had just gotten worse when Sarah informed him at lunch that one of the elderly patients he was seeing regularly, Miss Pelly, died from apoplexia last evening.

Groggily he reached the flat in the evening. Shrugging his rain-soaked coat from his shoulders, he went directly in the kitchen and set the kettle up. It was just when he reached up to get one of the mugs out of the cupboard. With his left hand. One twitch, sudden flare of muscle movement, clenching, unclenching, and the cup felt from his boneless fingers.

"Got it", a familiar baritone voice said. John looked sidewards to see the Sherlock-hallucination holding the seemingly rescued cup. By now it probably laid scattered on the tiles.

"Um, hello", said the illusion and held the cup out to him. John made a mental note to dodge the area where it was standing now when he did not want to walk into the shards.

"No, thanks", John said and turned around to get another, real cup out of the cupboard. The stains on the table where still there where he had poured tea in a cup that 'Sherlock' had given him.

"Now get out." "John, please, let me expl-" "Out!" He was to tired to deal with this right now. The hallucination looked at him with shocked and hurt grey eyes (dead, blank, blood everywhere, pooling on the pavement, just reflecting the sky). They always looked hurt about his outburst and John repressed the automatic guilt that reared its head, knowing that he should not care about hurting the things his damaged subconscious mind threw at him.

By the time he got the tea tin, the fake Sherlock had already bolted out of the door.

"That was very rude what you did yesterday."

"Ah, was it?"

"Yes, it was."

"I wasn't aware that illusions have feelings."

"Could we please stop to pretend that I am an illusion?"

"Sherlock, your right arm is currently in a very solid brick wall."

"Alright, you've got a point there."

When he came back from work to Bakerstreet, Sherlock was already standing in the living room, examining Johns scattered belongings. He turned around when John came in.

"You've kept my violin." "Of course I did."

"And the skull." "Excellent observation."

"Still you don't like me being here."

John sighed tiredly. Inside his head, a voice was screaming at him, to tell the illusion No, no, stay here, I need you, I'm falling apart, stay here! However, the doctor inside him insisted on Yes, go, leave, stop troubling me and driving me insane.

"Yes, I don't like having you here", he snapped defensively before the doctor lost the war he was about to lose. The fake-Sherlock nodded in a defeated manner and left without another word. The room felt very empty without his imagined presence.