He was mostly numb now. Not angry anymore, but completely numb.
Stages of grief, wasn't it? Denial, anger, sadness, acceptance, something like that?
Sherlock was in the numb stage. And if there wasn't a numb stage, they were wrong, because there was nothing else this could be.
Because his healing bullet wound didn't hurt anymore, even though he stopped taking the painkillers they gave him (non-narcotic of course, Mycroft wasn't stupid), and when he examined it in the mirror, the skin was still pink and new, not done meshing the wound closed.
And when he cut himself on the glass slide he broke, his hands shaking too much to put it on the microscope, that didn't hurt either, even as he watched the blood drip from his hand.
He put a plaster on it and cleaned up the glass, tucking the largest piece away, just in case he needed it.
He had awful dreams, nightmares really, in which John came to him and asked him why he let them take parts of him. In his dream, John was ripped open and bloody, his eyes gone, and looking so, so sad. He begged John to forgive him, that he was sorry, and John just kept repeating, over and over, "I told you I would be fine." But he couldn't be fine now, not without his heart and his eyes and his lungs breathing air and life into him, and behind those words was an accusation that Sherlock was to blame, because he was the one who let them do it to him.
Sherlock woke up from those dreams with a wet pillow.
Some nights he would lay awake, plotting the quiet murders of the doctors who missed the bleed in John's brain, the ones who allowed him to die, quietly and alone on the operating table while they fixed something that would never matter.
He could have done it. No one would ever know. It could look like an accident.
Sherlock would have been an excellent serial killer if he wasn't a detective.
But Sherlock studied them further, and found that although they were flawed, the doctors who'd treated John were actually good, and actually did care about what had happened. They'd attended his funeral, given their condolences to Sherlock. He supposed it wasn't their fault, but didn't know if he could ever find it in himself to forgive them. He wondered how they slept at night as he lay awake staring at the ceiling and tracing the thousand threads of what might have been.
He slept better when it was John's bed he slept in, the faint quintessential John smell still there, and in that moment between sleep and awakeness, Sherlock could still believe that John was alive, that he was standing over him, waiting for him to wake up.
If only he could live there.