A/N: Thank you all, as always, for your reviews and story alerts. It gives me thrills. This is a long one here, sorry!
"John."
There was a pause, and then, "I, I can't come down, so we'll just have to do it like this. My apology. It's all true. Everything they said about me. I invented Moriarty."
A tight breath. "I'm a fake."
The next bits were too fast, tumbling out as though he didn't like the taste of them and was chasing them off his tongue. "I researched you. Before we met, I discovered everything I could to impress you. It's a trick. Just a magic trick.
"The newspapers were right all along. I want you to tell Lestrade, I want you to tell Mrs. Hudson, and Molly, in fact, tell anyone who will listen to you, that I created Moriarty, for my own purposes.
"Please, will you do this for me?" The 'please' didn't sound right in that voice, so vulnerable and raw. John tried to tell himself that it was just part of a ruse, a character the detective could so easily slip on for a moment. He knew it wasn't.
"This phone call, it's, um…It's my note." Then his voice took on a hard edge, sounding more like the man John knew. "It's what people do, don't they? Leave a note."
No other words were said on the recording, but it didn't click off immediately. John couldn't stop himself from studying those nine seconds of silence, straining his ears, searching for a hidden clue in the stillness.
He didn't need the recording anymore to play it all back. It was seared in his memory, on a loop in his mind, so he could listen while he was brushing his teeth, or waiting for his tea to steep.
Each time, he ached to interrupt the monologue. To tell him, "Alright now, stop this," to ask, "Why are you saying this?" But the sentences kept on, a tinny soliloquy streaming from small speakers.
He was obscenely grateful to Mycroft for giving the mobile to him. The man couldn't have known that he was granting him more time, new words to replace the horrible last exchange they'd shared in St. Bart's. Although he felt dirty thinking it, he much preferred the pain on the message to dwelling on how loudly his voice had echoed when he'd called his friend a machine.
A much pleasanter obsession. It made him queasy to think on it.
On the tube that morning, John tried to puzzle out why the thing he refused to call a note spent so much time telling him things he refused to believe.
If he'd been one of his own patients, he wouldn't have been allowed out of his flat; he hadn't fully recovered, but he couldn't stay inside anymore. His intent had been to walk to his appointment, to glean distractions from London's streets. After the staircase down left him winded and just one block had sent him to the edges of the sidewalk, clinging to the walls of buildings to relieve the weight from his bad leg, it was clear: walking was no longer an option.
It was no wonder that his thoughts had returned to the phone recording once he was sitting in the cramped Underground car. It was to be expected, really, that he'd imagine he caught sight of a familiar head of dark curls.
His eyes watered, and he realized he must have been staring, unblinking, for rather a long time.
John cleared his throat, a bad idea that sent him into a ghastly coughing fit that had heads turning. He couldn't shake the feeling that people were watching him, however, long after he had gotten his breath back.
When he reflected on that, it too made sense. The tellys and tabloids had been blasting the story of 'The Fake Genius' Fall' and he was sure to have been mentioned in at least a few pieces.
What made less sense, of course, was that message. But however confusing its intents might be, it was his. His own bit of the detective that no one else could touch.
It was silly to be sitting across from his therapist, holding secretly on to the subject that most consumed his thoughts, but he didn't want to share those words, that voice, that extra time, with anyone else. And he couldn't share the fact that his friend's final conversation had been with a phone's voice recorder.
Imagining how things could have gone differently if only he'd called John for real instead of leaving a note on his own mobile. If only John had gotten back to the hospital quicker, reached the roof in time. If he had never left in the first place.
He could hear Molly's voice behind him as she climbed out of the cab they'd shared in their race to help Mrs. Hudson. Her horrified half-whisper, "John, up there." Heard his own shout ripped from his body. The earth shattering crack of bones and flesh meeting stone. Screams. The lifeless air of an empty home.
"Why today?" Dr. George's voice cut through his reverie. It was a stupid question. The looks he'd gotten on the tube were proof enough of that.
"Do you want to hear me say it?"
"18 months since our last appointment."
That didn't change anything, didn't mean anything; John knew she couldn't be unaware. "Do you read the papers?"
"Sometimes," she said.
"And you watch telly." If she wanted him so tell her, he could, but of course everybody already knew. "You know why I'm here. I'm here because – "
He couldn't.
His breath caught painfully. He wondered if the feeling would ever stop. His mind skittered away from the idea of things stopping.
"What happened, John?" Dr. George leaned forward.
And his thoughts were yanked right back. Slamming up against the sight of his friend blurring past windows in a moment that constantly accelerated and never ended. Crashing through the crowding people who pinned him down, pulled him away. Smashing into rainwater eyes swirled with red, eyes that had spent their last waking second alone on a rooftop and their last earthly minute alone in a graveyard.
It wasn't her fault she didn't know. Nobody could.
Her face was expectant. For now, he'd have to stick with what everybody already knew.
"Sher –" His chest and throat constricted. Had he really not spoken the name in that long? It felt different than he remembered.
"You need to get it out."
He nodded quickly. Took the plunge. "My best friend, Sherlock Holmes, is dead."
It hurt to say, hurt to think. He closed his eyes to brace against the pain, turned away from the echo his voice had made. It felt impossible that a person could hurt so much and still be alive.
"Oh, John." Her soothing voice brimmed over with pity. "He didn't have friends."
His head jerked back as though he'd been slapped. He couldn't find the air to respond.
He wanted to tell her that she couldn't be more wrong, that of course Sherlock had friends. He'd had John. Still had him. But the last thing he'd ever said to Sherlock, "Friends protect people," rang in his ears. Maybe if Sherlock had had a good enough friend, he would still be here.
A twisting heat began to swell up in his leg. Maybe Dr. George wasn't wrong. He tried to blink back the burning behind his eyes.
"He told you so himself, didn't he," the therapist continued. "He told you he was a fake, that he'd been tricking you. Tricking everyone."
"He didn't mean – "
Dr. George cut off his protest. "I think you need to come to terms with the truth about Sherlock Holmes."
"How did you know?" His voice lashed out. It was steady for the first time during the appointment. He countered her equivocal, "It doesn't matter," response with, "It does matter. That was a private message. How did you know."
"John." She shifted in her seat. "This was clearly a high profile case. Surely you must have known that the police would investigate."
"So have they printed the transcript of it now in those papers you only sometimes read?" As the fresh loss sunk in, he suddenly just wanted to be back in his bed, where he should have stayed. He was still suffering from the vestiges of his pneumonia, and he was tired.
"Of course he didn't release it to the papers. Rich just thought it'd be helpful for your therapist to know, and passed it along to me."
John's blood ran cold. "Rich."
"Richard Brook. He wants to help you, John." Dr. George sat forward in her chair, earnest. "He just wants to help you through this."
With so many things he wanted to say, he was lost for a response. He stifled a gasp as he stood and nearly crumpled from the agony in his leg. "No," he said. "I have to go."
He left the room, the anger pounding in his head muffling her attempts to convince him to return. He took a cab back to Baker Street to avoid the whispers that had followed him that morning and tried to massage his leg without the cabbie noticing. It didn't work.
Being angry though, that helped. Rage fueled his climb back up the stairs, but once he reached the landing, he was shaky and his grip on the cane was slippery with sweat.
He was planning on taking a warm shower and fixing himself a cup of tea, maybe spiced with some of Mrs. Hudson's herbal soothers.
He was not planning on being greeted by the barrel of a gun.