Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes © Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A/N: I realize that as well as being a character study, this story is also a study of emotion itself.
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Part II —
The Second Fall
(viewed through the five stages of grief)
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"And so I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
— Poe
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He recalls writing an assignment on the Kübler Ross model—or more commonly known as the five stages of grief—in the study halls, nodding and thinking he understood. He'd gotten an A. It seems like another world; a landscape cut from old film stock, grainy and washed out, high contrast, unreal.
The experience is quite different from mere book-learning. Knowledge shrivels up. Pages, burning.
DENIAL
"He's not dead."
"John."
"No, really, he's not. Can't be." His gloves curl, creaking. Yet there is hollowness in his words, like that of memorized lies. "No. I won't believe it. He's too clever. He'd outwit Death himself."
"Brains are nothing when splattered on the pavement." Human language rots on John's tongue. Mycroft's tone softens, "John. Please. I despair knowing—"
"Despair," he snarls, jaw set so tight he might have swallowed worlds. "Despair is washing blood of your hands, watching it spiral down the drain and realizing that it's the last you'll see of him."
"John." Mycroft repeats. John waits for him to say anything, anything at all. But there is nothing to say. So John hangs up.
This is the last time he talks to a person. The phone falls to the floor. He is sick of hollow condolences and pity.
He remembers the words of an army acquaintance; a harelipped lieutenant with alcohol issues. "Defeat your monsters or become them." Shortly after, he'd died of liver cancer.
So John wraps his emotion into a glass jar, screws the lid on tight and throws it into a dark corner of his mind, praying what's inside will never get out.
The apartment is a prison. An isolated, old box. He becomes aware of how lonely he really is. They left the scarf with him. Another memory to add to his collection, to cling to during the nights. Existence has become a chore. John drags himself back and forth from the bedroom, the bathroom, and the living room, living on noodles and gruel and shabby takeaway shit (nothing Chinese, though). Sometimes he throws things behind his back, expecting someone to catch them. He refuses to talk with Mrs. Hudson face to face. She doesn't have the heart to throw him out and he uses it, selfishly.
That is the price to pay when one chooses to live only in one's memories. Perhaps there is a clue among them. He fears that the day he'll leave the apartment, Sherlock will return and ask why didn't you wait for me?
The weeks pass in a haze. He'd die to feel something.
"Just one more miracle," he mutters to himself. The next day, a bird flies onto the window and dies. The walls close in on him and he feels ill. John feels the sensation of some great ideal slowly crumbling within himself. A little death. A slowly hemorrhaging wound.
The thing in the jar grows; a hairy black thing with sharp teeth and staring eyes.
And John?
He feels something.
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ANGER
He looks at his reflection.
The man in the mirror is thin and gaunt. His skin is pale, glowing faintly white in the moonlit room. Thin fingers twitch slightly as he unwraps his arms from around his body. He's lost a lot of weight. Every breath he takes makes his entire body shake. The worst part is the man's face. His hair is messy and dull. Thin lips are slightly parted, and his cheeks are hollow. His eyes are dead. The fire was extinguished by the darkness.
He touches the mirror. His fingers curl into a fist.
He smashes it. Again and again and again.
(Smashing himself until he becomes whole—)
The jar cracks with it.
The destruction follows through the apartment. Shattering porcelain plates. Tearing down wallpaper. Making a mess. He resents his memories; resents Sherlock for leaving. There is guilt there, too, because of the anger, which again makes him angrier, and guiltier. It threatens to drive him insane.
It seems like an endless pool, pouring out of his pores. Temporary structure to the nothingness of loss.
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BARGAINING
What if.
The two words swell.
Multiple realties, swirling through his head, what if they'd stopped Moriarty sooner, what if John had run faster, what if, what if, what if. He will do anything to not feel the pain from loss.
It takes form of a temporary truce. He goes through the boxes of evidence Sherlock collected, memorizes the numerous criminal networks, and gives himself entirely to deduction. A picture starts unfolding. Upon having learned what he can learn, he remembers Sherlock's words.
Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
And Sherlock is dead.
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DEPRESSION
He lies on the floor of 221B, and asks himself what he'll do tonight.
The answer is:
Search for SHERLOCK.
The name rips through him like an earthquake. John contains himself. Barely.
Daylight slips through a crack in the Venetian binds. Dust glitters in the rays of light. He avoids them like the plague—he feels uncomfortable in anything other than darkness.
Post-bargaining, realizing the futility of it all, the mind moves to the present. The feelings return, deeper this time, unable to disguise themselves as rage or hope. Sadness. Black, black, black. He withdraws from life and into a fog of intense sadness, wondering, perhaps, if there is any point to it all. The loss settles in his soul, triggered by a deep understanding.
It is a cleansing process, too. Drenching him. He cannot escape.
But instead of feeling cleansed, he feels dead.
The thing from the jar, however, is alive and well. It peers out of John's eyes and twists his mouth into a horrible grin.
'Defeat your monsters or become them.'
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A—
(Not everyone gets to this stage, John had written. Everybody grieves differently, and some deaths are so sudden that their close ones are stuck in the first stage forever, isolating themselves from truth.
When he'd be a doctor, he thought, he'd try and spare as many people as possible from a fate like that.)
VENGEANCE
The gun fits him as if connected to his hand.
John leaves 221 Baker Street and does not look back.