John surfaced from the pool, gasping. Moriarty was nowhere to be seen and the bomb still hadn't gone off. Shaking the water from his face, he struggled to the edge when he saw a crumpled body on the floor. His heart was racing as he clambered back onto the tiles and crawled over to what was definitely Sherlock Holmes.
He could smell gunpowder and blood in the air mixed with chlorine.
Not caring if Moriarty or his sniper was still in the vicinity, he leaned over Sherlock and flipped him onto his back. John clinically noted that Sherlock had been shot twice: once in the heart (sniper) and once in the throat (Moriarty). There was no way he could still be alive, but all the same, he checked for a pulse, as if desperately hoping that the wounds weren't fatal, that Sherlock Holmes had defied the odds and survived.
John shouldn't have been alive, but Sherlock had pushed him out of the way in the last moment.
As his damp fingers slipped from Sherlock's cool wrist, he heard the echoes of footsteps. John smiled grimly. So Moriarty had returned to finish him after all.
"Do you love him, mortal?" That was not Moriarty's voice.
John stiffened and turned around to see a tall, pale man in a long black trench coat and a sharp black suit. His stance and the way his green eyes seemed to be able to learn every little detail about him with one look was familiar. He found that he could not speak as the pain and the reality of the situation, of a future without Sherlock Holmes, slowly started to seep in-
"What if I told you that I can bring him back?"
John stared, trying to process what the man just said. Perhaps he was silent for too long because the strange man with the piercing green eyes was now only a step away from Sherlock's body. John leaned back, trying in vain to shield his dead friend from the looming man.
"I only ask a single thing in return for healing each fatal wound of his, John Watson. Will you accept my terms?"
The strange man was crazy. He had to be. But at the same time, maybe it was because he was crazy, because he looked so much like Sherlock, because John Watson himself was treading the thin line between overwhelming grief and guilt that he nodded.
The man smiled and knelt down to look at John at eye-level. It wasn't a nice smile, it was a smile similar to James Moriarty's, to Mycroft Holmes's. It was a cunning sort of expression. John desperately wished he had his gun with him at that moment.
"One: you will end your relations with the mortal named Sarah."
John gaped, not sure why or how this man knew about Sarah. He didn't wait for an answer and looked down at Sherlock's body.
John followed the man's eyes and saw the man's hand hover over the gaping neck wound. The man's hand was glowing an eerie green. John blinked and blinked again, not quite believing what he saw when the hand moved away from Sherlock's neck: the wound was completely gone.
"Two: you will act upon your true feelings and start a relationship with Sherlock."
"What?" John looked away from the man's hand, which was now over Sherlock's heart and stared at him in disbelief. What feelings? Who was this man? Why did he care?
The man stood a moment later, ignoring John's question, and straightened his coat. He had a small smile on his face which was just a touch less evil, but disturbingly fond. The smile grew back to what John's confused mind categorised as "normal evil level" when the man turned to look at him.
"Remember, you agreed and I will know if you do not fulfill your part of the bargain." And with that, the man just...vanished. John desperately hoped that all of that evening was just a really, really bad dream.