Chapter two

Everything seemed darker today to one John Watson. He had arrived at the surgery to discover a frantic teenager stumbling from a car, hauling the unconscious body of his companion.

Low blood pressure, no pupil action, no response to stimuli of any kind at all. The poor boy had died about ten minutes after getting into the ER.

John had placed his gloved hands on either side of the examining table and sighed heavily. Brow furrowed, he glanced at the wall clock and turned to his attending nurse,

'Time of death: 7:20 am. Cause unknown as of yet, presumed fatal stroke,' as he was speaking the door to the ER had blown open, the first boy racing in and flinging himself over the body of his friend, trailing a stricken looking nurse.

'Charlie? CHARLIE!' wailing the boy pounded his fists on the still chest of Charlie Kaeigh, 'No! No No, no no no nononono! You can't DO this to me! Charlie, come back!'

John moved to pull the despondent boy from the body but his fingers closed on empty air. Legs gone weak the boy had slid to the floor, sobbing, still clutching his friend's stiff fingers.

John knelt too, wrapping a strong arm around quivering shoulders. He looked up at the nurse who mouthed a name.

'Kyle,' he tried tentatively, the boy leaned harder against his side, 'Kyle, go ahead. Let it out,'

And so like that they stayed, on the floor leaning against a cabinet until well after the body had been taken to the morgue. Eventually Kyle extracted himself from John's hold and stood, drawing shaky breath and rubbing his raw eyes.

'You were close,' John said quietly.

'Flat-mates. At community together,' Kyle's voice was flat and raspy, '6 years,'

'What happened?' John asked, not unkindly.

'We were arguing,' a horrible excuse for a laugh, 'about why the bread was in the icebox. He said it went stale faster. I thought it made better toast cold,' Kyle clutched at his face,

'We were yelling- a right proper row, cursing, bringing up things that shouldn't have been. All that happens when you live together too long and a little argument happens. You know, right?' Big pleading eyes, red rimmed and a soft grey-green.

'Aye,' John knew.

'And he just stopped. Mouth working but no sound comin' out. He sorta, Charlie sorta wobbled then snapped out of it and said my name like he were confused all a sudden and he…' another sob tore free,

'Toppled forward onto the table. Not breathin', no nothing. I called emergency but our land lady had just parked so we rushed here. Ambulance woulda taken too long,' Here Kyle froze and looked at John in utter despair,

'Was that wrong?! Did I, did, would he have-DID I KILL CHARLIE?!'

'Absolutely not,' Immediate, 'No, don't think that a moment Kyle,' John gripped the paling teen's elbow tight, 'Like as not there was nothing better you could have done,'

A kind of horrible relief filled Kyle's face before he pressed his eyes shut again.

'Do… you know what the last thing I said to him before he-,' a wave of the hands. John waited.

'I told him I hated his guts. Now… I, oh god, he knew, right? He knew I was lying-Right!? He knew he was my best friend? Right?!'

John gathered the shaking youth in another embrace and pet Kyle's head gently as he cried again, no tears left but just wracking sobs,

'He knew. I'm sure he did,'

'He knew,'

The rest of John's day had been as normal. Elderly in for their shots, a broken arm on a cute little girl from falling off a horse, two cases of food poisoning, and the usual bevy of coughs, colds, and paperwork.

But all John could see or hear was Kyle's plea.

"He knew, right?"

A terrible thought came unbidden to John's mind. Were he to die, would Sherlock be as broken hearted as Kyle had been? What if Sherlock died, would he know how much a part of John's life the gangly consulting detective had become?

They fought. Loudly, often. Over similar things- though eyeballs in the microwave and bread in the icebox were only cursorily similar. What if John's last words to Sherlock one day would be ones of in-the-moment malice? If Sherlock's to John were how stupid the doctor could be. What if his friend died…

They were friends, right?

John was so preoccupied with his thoughts that it wasn't until a text from Harry that he realized he's been sitting in his darkening office for an hour and a half.

Would Sherlock be worried that he was so late without word? No texts from the man were in his inbox. John shrugged into his outerwear and locked up with a steadily growing feeling of heaviness in his stomach. His silent cab ride home did little to quell his mind, and when Sherlock didn't even look up from his microscope at John's entrance his mood darkened even more.

The wild haired consulting detective had effectively pervaded the entirety of John's life to the point of total saturation, but it seemed like John wasn't even worth a 'hullo' at the door. Two hours could have meant large trouble, but Sherlock hadn't so much as texted to see what had kept him.

John knew that he could never go back to a normal life. One without Sherlock. If he lost his flat mate, if Sherlock sent him away, he would enlist straightaway, run back to the war and do his best to forget the excitement and crazed adventures of living with Sherlock Holmes. Apparently, however, Sherlock would miss him no more than a missing area rug.

So John sat by the fire and brooded, wondering if he could stand Sherlock's apathy to a show of friendship, and never once realized that the silence in the kitchen was not that of scientific concentration. It was the silence of a man who was worried to his soul but had no way to show it.