There are some spoilers for The Great Game in here, but I'm assuming that if you've seen season 2, then you've seen season 1's finale.
There isn't a whole lot of dialouge in this one-it's mostly John being depressed that Sherlock's gone.
Thank you for all of your reviews! I'm pretty sure that's the most amount of reviews I've ever had for one chapter. You guys are awesome! I'm working on responding to your wonderful words; if I haven't, it's nothing personal. It just means I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Hope you enjoy the chapter!
A Good Man
Chapter 2
John returned to 221 B Baker Street three weeks after his visit to Sherlock's grave site. It had been close to a month since Sherlock and Moriarty's last stand and John would admit to the fact that he still wasn't dealing with it. The therapist had been as useful after Sherlock's death as she had upon John's return from Afghanistan and no matter how hard Mrs. Hudson or Lestrade tried, John just couldn't handle the fact that someone as good and decent as Sherlock Holmes had been ruined by a man like Moriarty. Had been reduced to nothing and then forced to jump off a building to save his friends. To save John.
Swallowing around the sudden lump in his throat, John shoved the thoughts of the past month out of his mind and took in his surroundings. He was standing on the top of the stairs, his hand hovering above the door knob. It struck him then that he was afraid of what awaited on the other side of that door. He didn't want to open it and lose what little hope he had that Sherlock was still alive.
"Don't be ridiculous, John. Open the door."
John huffed a small laugh, unable to believe that he was terrified of a door.
"I'm… insane," he decided at last and pushed the door open.
It was obvious from the get go that someone had cleared the flat of all of Sherlock's belongings. John's few contributions to the furniture were there—his chair, the dining room table that was oddly bare without Sherlock's experiments, and the telly—but the rest of it was gone, as if it had never been there in the first place.
The smiley face on the garish wallpaper was still there, still riddled with bullet holes. It was the only presence of Sherlock that John saw in the entire flat—and he checked everywhere, including Sherlock's old bedroom.
John took a deep breath as he returned to the main room. The flat seemed bigger than it ever had before, even without the obvious lack of furniture. It seemed foreign, almost as if John had been transported to some alternate reality where Sherlock had never existed.
There was a pile of newspapers in the corner. The one on top of the pile showed today's date and an image of Sherlock in his deerstalker. A morbid sense of curiosity spurred John over to the newspapers, and with slightly trembling hands, he picked it up.
He wasn't sure what he was expecting—the newspapers were still having a field day with the events at St. Bart's and Sherlock being a fraud. John should have known this would be more of the same, but it still didn't stop him from becoming irrationally angry when the headline read More Evidence of Fraud.
John knew without a shadow of a doubt that Sherlock wasn't a fraud. Even given his friend's suicide 'note' and Sherlock all but begging—begging—John to believe that what that reporter had said was true, that he was a fake, John knew that no one could have faked that utter brilliance.
That, and he researched himself on the Internet and none of the things Sherlock had deduced from John could be found on the Internet, save for his military record and the fact that he had a sister. Which Sherlock had deduced incorrectly, thinking that Harry was a man.
A wave of sadness crashed over John, nearly drowning him. It didn't matter if Sherlock was truly a fraud or not, not anymore. He was gone, taken by Moriarty's twisted quest for excitement.
John dropped the newspaper to the floor and kicked it savagely. It was just further proof of how desperate Moriarty had been, if he had resulted to destroying Sherlock's reputation. It showed truly who the better man was and while it should have comforted John that he had been friends with that one, it didn't. Because in the end, being the better man didn't save Sherlock. It destroyed him.
"There are lives at stake Sherlock. Actual human lives. Jus-Just so I know, do you care about that at all?"
"Will caring about them help save them?"
"No."
"Then I'll continue not to make that mistake."
"And you find that easy, do you?"
"Yes. Very. Is that news to you?"
"No. No."
"I've disappointed you."
"Good. That's a good deduction. Yeah."
"Don't make people into heroes, John. They don't exist and if they did, I wouldn't be one of them."
Their conversation from so long ago, back during their first encounter with Moriarty, played clearly in John's head as if it had just happened yesterday.
"You were wrong," John whispered to the empty flat. "You are a hero. And you weren't a fraud."
He stood there for a moment or two, trying to get a handle on his emotions.
Out of habit more than anything else, John moved to the kitchen, alarmed at how clean it was. Never in his two years of living in that flat had John seen the counters. They had always been cluttered with Sherlock's experiments or—to John's amused horror—body parts.
But now, they were pristinely clean, without so much of a trace that unspeakable events had occurred there only a month prior. Even the burn on the counter that John himself made when attempting to put out a fire that occurred in one of Sherlock's many experiments gone wrong had disappeared.
Anger, sharp and bitter, coursed through John as he stared at the spot that burn used to be. It was obvious that the counters had been replaced, and for some reason, that made John so very angry.
Without pausing to think about what he was doing, John yanked out his cell phone, a device he hadn't used in over three weeks, and dialed a number.
"Hello?" a bored female's voice answered.
"Get Mycroft," John ordered, his military bearing spilling into his voice.
"He's not available," the woman answered, still bored and completely unaffected by the angry man on the other end of the line. "May I take a message?"
"Tell your boss that the next time he wants to clean up after his brother to leave the bloody counters alone!" John all but shouted. He went on for another five minutes, depicting how much of an idiot Mycroft was for replacing the counters and that surely the man had better things to do for the British government than waste money on replacing the counters.
"And tell him to learn to mind his own bloody business and quit having me followed!" John ended, his voice rising to a dull roar.
He fell quiet for a minute, before realizing that the woman had already hung up the phone.
"Great," John muttered. "Just great. Go and hang up, leaving the crazy man to deal with an empty apartment. Half the stuff Sherlock had was mine, you know!"
He glared at the offending object in his hand for a moment longer before hurling it across the apartment. It crashed against the door jam and fell to the floor in a million pieces.
"Still having rows with machines, I take it?" a soft baritone drawled from the door.
John froze, his mouth falling open and his eyes growing wide as he lifted his gaze from the shattered phone on the floor to the owner of the voice.
"Sherlock?"