A little oneshot inspired by a song-prompt someone gave me: Dark Paradise, by Lana del Rey. I liked how it turned out, so, I hope you guys do too :)
"John, it's been so long. He's never coming back, okay? You need to let him go."
The words crash over the doctor; they are waves over his head as he drowns, while the water that fills his eyes and ears and mouths are much more immediate concerns, the watery splinters of a consulting detective, making him choke and gasp. It is a soft voice that says them. Part of John wishes, wishes, wishes so very much that it could be as simple as nodding, simple as just detaching the Sherlock-memories from where they've curled around his spinal cord and sending them up towards the stars, to whatever's up there.
But most of him, the most of him knows that it will never be that simple.
He does not respond to the sad-eyed detective-inspector, instead setting his phone on the table, already playing a video that John has watched and rewatched and watched again and again.
It is Sherlock, sitting on the couch with natural light filtering in through the window, and he is playing at his violin, picking out melodies and weaving them together into an unmistakable composition of his own creation. His eyes are large, bright, and there's the slightest of smiles on his face. The shivering tunes of the piece on video fill the flat as John turns the volume up and up and up. He does not know John is filming him and this is why he continues to play; Sherlock does (did?) not like being caught on film for reasons unknown. You can't hear it in the video, but it plays in John's head, the barely audible creak of a floorboard as his stealth failed him. Sherlock stops playing mid-note and tosses the violin aside, pouncing at the doctor holding the phone-camera.
There's a few seconds of confused, blurred video, though if John looks closely he can pick out the fabric of Sherlock's shirt there, a bit of floor there, the corner of the window at the bottom of the shot for just a second. And then it evens out again, with Sherlock laughing, John giggling along with him. "You insufferable git," the video-Sherlock says, hands tousling at John's jumper, his face close to the camera. "Is that thing still recording?"
"No," John hears himself say, but Sherlock takes it from his hands anyway, and John sees a shot of himself, head thrown back, mouth open in caricature, laughing at the silliness of the situation. Then Sherlock lifts the camera up and turns it back on himself.
"This is Sherlock Holmes, reporting from 221B where John Watson is currently incapacitated with a severe case of the giggles. Someone call Detective-Inspector Lestrade! I fear we'll have to lock him up!" Sherlock dissolves into laughter as the camera shakes and pixelates, turning his vivid, blue-green eyes up into the lens, framed by impossibly long eyelashes, and a flash of white teeth is the last thing the camera sees before Sherlock reaches around and shuts it off.
The screen of John's phone goes dark, and he slips it back in his pocket, slips his only visual memory of Sherlock close to his skin. Without thinking, he hums a few of the strains from the piece Sherlock had been playing before noticing John there, and Lestrade, the bastard, looks almost as though he's about to cry.
"I'll…see you around, mate," he says, his voice soft and impossibly broken for the strong man he's proven himself to be. "Al…Alright?"
John nods, but when Lestrade leaves he gets the video back out. He considers posting it on the blog, but then a wave of selfishness hits him because no, he will save this all for himself, save the flashes of happier times for his very own keeping.
He half-wishes he was dead too.
He meets Molly at a pub. The poor thing looks worse than John, and John privately thinks that's saying something. The dark circles under her eyes are pronounced, and instead of starting with a beer or mixed drink or something lighter on the mind, she turns with determination to the bartender and orders a tray of shots, telling John matter-of-factly that this is what she needs, to get a little off her face tonight.
John thinks this an excellent idea, and orders one for himself. He's not eaten, and he realizes that this probably will not end well, but it's not like he cares.
Doesn't care about much these days, to be honest.
After a few drinks, Molly's face comes alive, slack instead of taut, a hint of pink lipstick slipping from the corner of her mouth, and that's when they talk. Sober words are awkward, wooden. Drunk ones, though.
"So why do you still come around?" Molly asks, her voice half an octave higher than usual and her words gently slurred. "You come to the morgue sometimes. And Greg says you come to Scotland Yard to consult on occasion, when you can be spared…" She swigs at the beer she's ordered, slopping a bit of his down her front.
John laughs, lolling his head back. He's feeling delightfully loose and warm. He's been so cold since it happened, since the fall…the heating bill's gone up because he's been keeping the flat at much higher temperatures than usual. It's just…it just happens. He just gets cold. A lot.
"Tell me, Molly Hooper," he laughs quietly, putting one hand on her shoulder. It seems important for their faces to be close together to match the enormity of the revelation he has been unable to make without the help of…what is this? Smirnoff? "Molly Hooper!" John says again, tasting the simple name, saying it loudly then softly until he feels he can finally move on with his sentence. "Have you ever been in love?"
Molly shakes her head, muttering something into her hair about the awfulness of men and how they've never been right for her. John ignores her, sighing and taking another drink from the bottle in front of him.
"It's gotta count for something," he slurs, eyes half-lidded. "Doesn't it? Love?"
"Sure."
"So he's still out there somewhere." John closes his eyes and smiles a beatific smile, colors spreading out under his eyes, ice-blue, dark purple, forest green. He nods, slowly. "Since I love him, he has to be there."
Molly looks on sadly, changing from pleased to dismal in just a few words. She steals a glance over John's shoulder to a stranger in a booth at the back of the bar, hood pulled over his head and dark glasses concealing sharp, angular features and Arctic eyes, something wet glittering at the point where the side of his nose opens out onto a cheek. She stares and stares and John does not notice her looking away from him, over him, and she stares and feels like she might cry again.
John, for his part, has stopped speaking, and without another word he runs out onto the street, straight past the stranger, who drops his head into his hands and downs the small glass of amber liquid in front of him in one. When Molly follows, she finds John on his knees in the gutter, being violently sick, vomit streaming from his open mouth onto a grate. The splattering sound it makes turns her own stomach, and the sidewalk is shifting gently, but she helps him to his feet anyway, breathing shuddering breaths through her mouth.
"I could be dead in a second," John says, wiping away a stray tear that's leaked from his left eye. He stares out at the traffic, cabs and buses and cars and bikes and people just streaming absolutely everywhere in a never-ending current of life, breath, lights, as though he thinks of running into the mess, waiting for a double-decker to take everything he's ever worked for away from him. "Everything's…so…fragile."
"I see him everywhere, Molly," he confesses after a pause. "Absolutely everywhere, and I think it's gonna kill me in the end."
Molly just cries silently and holds his arm.
"John," Sherlock says, sweeping too-long eyelashes against the doctor's jaw, his baritone thick, rich, exactly how John remembers it. "I miss you."
"I miss you too," John tries to say, but realizes that he cannot find the words; he cannot speak, he cannot even move. Sherlock's eyes sadden as he does not get a response, and John redoubles his efforts to talk out loud, but to no avail; he is forced to be silent as Sherlock pulls away from him, intensely, gorgeously graceful, and climbs a ladder to the top of the highest star, too-long coat swirling around him, dark bilious water pooling at his feet. He climbs the ladder until he reaches the top, illuminated in the brightest silver-light John's ever seen, crows in joy once, and then throws out his arms and lets himself fall.
"Come with me," he can hear Sherlock whisper, the sound magnified against the sky. "Come with me, John, I'm waiting for you. Waiting, just on the other side of the moon…"
John does not want to wake up. He can feel his body struggling to do it, and yet he forces himself to remain asleep because this is the only time he can see Sherlock, touch him, hear his voice saying more than the patterned tracks of the video he's nearly broken his phone replaying.
But all dreams come to an end, and this one ends with a brief yell, quickly stifled by the pillow John buries his face into as he convulses, confused with what is reality and what is theory and if that's a real noise or if this is just another terrible Sherlockless dream.
He breathes until he feels halfway normal, transporting him into sleep.
And by the first light grey lights of dawn, Sherlock Holmes slips gently through the front door.