I've spent my life on one battlefield or another. Dodging between Hells on Earth. First it was the fighting in Afghanistan. Then it was the crime in London. But the worst war I've ever fought was the one in my own mind, the one where the paranoias would spin past like Doodlebugs, every time exploding in the next door town, the explosions bursting through to the red sky, stranding me from all course of escape. Wherever thoughts would flee, they would be trapped by fear of the raging fires, until panic would rot to insane certainty that this was the end.

Night after night the shell shock pounded around me all over again. The blood still seemed to stain over my subconscious, seeping through whenever I thought I was safe. If I did leave the flat, if I did go past the scene, I found myself walking round it as if he was still lying there, still... dying there. I'd stare down at it, crying without tears, my heart lurching, and suddenly it was like I could hear him telling me to fetch something again, telling me I was an idiot.

And I know I was his pet but what was so bad about that? I wasn't the mongrel slinking about the streets alone and starved of interest as I had been for so long. I was the pedigree, man's best friend, his loyal... partner. Screw the implications, what people thought. Maybe if we were given the chance, they'd have been right.

But we weren't.

He was dead.

And he was a damned liar. I knew it, I've known it all this time, as well as I know the sun's going to rise, and that it's going to rain, that life carries on and on with or without him.

"He was... he is my friend."

A flicker of a smile from the Ice Man. Sometimes I swear he worries, like he sees the disjointedness the world has become. Sometimes I swear he lies too. But then again, he is just an elaborate politician, after all.

"Sherlock saw something in you that no one ever else has, am I right?" Mycroft mused, looking at me in that way he always did - vague amusement, maybe pity at my inferiority. It's okay. I was used to it. I nodded, knew he was implying more, but everyone always was. I was used to that too. Now he narrowed his eyes, furrowed his eyebrows, as if his next point baffled him all the more. "And you saw something of him beyond his arrogance, his obsessions, his... self?"

I had to smile in return, my own way of defence against his harsh words over a dead man, whether for my benefit or Sherlock's. "Still with the sibling rivalry, Mycroft..." I murmured. "Why do you always... hate him? What, did mummy not buy you your own pony?"

He clenched his jaw at that. "You've grown spiteful despite yourself, Watson..."

"No, no... I've just lost my tolerance for people who don't understand what it feels like to have emotions."

"Then why defend my brother - you know he was the most apathetic man alive."

Was. Alive. I sighed, turned my straining eyes away from him, briefly licking my lip in my nerves. I wasn't looking for conflict, I really wasn't... just some closure, I guess. And so I clenched my jaw and changed the subject. "Did he die for nothing, Mycroft? Did he die to still be hated just as always? Is there no one that's going to offer a dead man the least respect?"

I swear I saw him flinch against his own character. And then he gave a dry smile and reminded, "You know as best as anyone that he asked for this hatred."

I was done here, unsure why I'd even come to meet him in the first place, scraping back my chair and leaning forward on his table, fists clenched, growling, "That doesn't mean he deserves it."

I don't know why I keep fighting for him. I don't know why I still hold up, don't know why I bother visiting his grave all this time. Part of me still doesn't believe it, even though the images haunt me constantly. I saw him fall. More than that, I saw him push himself to fall. It wasn't as though he didn't know what he was doing. It wasn't as though he didn't... apologise.

He spoke to me. In that last moment when I was too bloody stupid to realise or believe what I was seeing. He spoke to me, just me, only me. Was I the only one who would ever listen to him, the only one who cared about him? Not about what he could do, not about how I could use him, but about... him. Him, with his passion for the puzzles no one else knew how to entangle, him, with his bright eyes and sharp mind, him and his enjoyments, his life that I was proud to be a part of.

Him...

Some nights the nightmares would subside. Some nights I'd find I'd sleep in the darkness, with nothing violent or enraged troubling my mind. Some nights I'd actually start to dream again, just like in the times when he'd been alive... and we weren't on another restless case.

One night I dreamt that I was crying with my face buried in my pillow, that I was clutching it tight to myself as I always do these days, and then he tapped on the door and I turned to look at him.

"John," he would say simply. And he would say it again and again, each time his gaze narrowing, never flinching from me. I spun round, enthralled in emotions I knew he would never understand.

"What?" I demanded. "What, what is it now, Sherlock? What else is there for you to mock me over? So I have feelings, so I know what it means to hurt for the people who lose their friends and families, so what?!"

In all my nightmares he had sneered and cursed me for my emotions. Called me weak for all my fears, and then on the other hand called me heartless and selfish for putting myself through these torments, and for what? He never understood that it was for him.

But this time he stepped across the Rubicon that kept us apart, strode fluidly as ever into my room, boldly, and he knew it. He knew he was doing something he was uncomfortable with as he drew closer to my bedside.

"Wh-what are you doing?" I asked quickly. "What- Sherlock? Are you… alright?"

Normally in my nightmares now he'd fade away, blood trickling down his cheeks, his eyes dulling and freezing, but tonight they kept flickering over me, time and time again. I braced myself for the next unintentional insult.

"John." It seemed all he could say, all he could think, and suddenly my angst dissolved and I looked at him properly. His eyes, bright, like he was fascinated once again, fascinated by me. It was flattering in the most unnerving way – until he lightly touched his hand to my cheeks, smoothing away the tear stains with his thumb.

And like in some dreams, when you're conscious of it, you can choose what to do next, I found myself more in control than I was in real life itself. Even in my sleep I must have been trembling, unsure what to do, unsure what was right to do or what I could do or what I should do and-

And by the time I'd panicked round every avenue of thought, his lips brushed mine, and I was the one to melt away; heavy-handedly I reached out for him, grabbing his shoulders and feeling his slim body as I pulled him closer, and I knew this was his first time, I knew it by the way he didn't know what to do despite his normal attitude of self-assurance – he suddenly hesitated and restrained himself as I tried to kiss him deeper, and then he turned away, breaking from me, shutting his eyes and sighing, a sigh of more regret than anything else.

"Sherlock..?" I asked quietly, but he just stood up tall, refused to look at me, and then turned his back on me.

"I have to go."

And so he was gone.

In the morning I could have almost believed it was real.