"I knew you'd get it, John," was the first thing Sherlock said to him, beaming with pride, and that in itself should have broken the illusion The real Sherlock would have snapped at John impatiently. Something crisp and biting, wondering why it had taken him so long to get it right, when it was so obvious, John, a trained monkey would have stumbled upon the solution faster. And yet...once again, it didn't matter. It didn't matter that it wasn't real, that it was all in his head, because it was Sherlock, he was back, and it was real enough.
"Come here," John said. And here again should have been a little niggle of dissonance — the real Sherlock would never be so pliable, so complaisant, as to bound forward without a word, nestling softly into John's arms. The real Sherlock was manic energy or indolent langour, lightning in a bottle or a slow deep tidal pull. He was not, of all things, a cuddler. And yet here, in the tenuous twilight of John's lucid dreams, he was. He looped his long arms around John and squeezed him tight. He returned John's soft whispers with his own, their breaths mingling. Never once did he scoff at the pedestrian nature of it all; instead he returned John's tentative caresses, and answered his Don't leave me again, Sherlock with gentle reassurances. I'm here, John. I won't leave you. Never again. His warm breath huffed against John's ear, making him shiver.
In the harsh light of morning, sunlight spearing through his gritty eyes and into his pounding brain, John mocked himself mercilessly. The very idea, that Sherlock would do such things — would say such things. Of course John's mundane little brain couldn't simulate the true genius of Sherlock's conversation, the inspired flights of brilliance. No, this dream-Sherlock was a pale imitation created by John's piddling consciousness. It was John making him say these insipid platitudes, John's pathetic yearning that made Sherlock appear to return his affection. It was embarrassing, and unhealthy, and pitiable, and John couldn't stop doing it any more than he could cut his own heart out.
He developed a careful ritual, trying to walk a tightrope that would keep in check the twin demons of his predisposition to alcoholism and his equally insidious addiction to Sherlock. He felt them both like a fire in his blood - the craving for just a little more, just one more drink, just one more dream...
With the decisiveness of a doctor and the discipline of a soldier, he constructed a series of rules. Only on Friday night, when he had the weekend to recover. A careful number of drinks — beer, beer, whiskey, whiskey, whiskey — timed out scrupulously. Too fast and he would bypass the lucid dream and lapse into unconsciousness; too slow and he would lie awake, staring despairingly at the cracked ceiling of his bedsit, the alcohol buzzing in his system but Sherlock still cold and dead in his grave.
Even with his ritual in place it still went wrong now and again. Once he even experienced a few hours of blackout, a gaping empty maw in his memories; cups of tea cooling on the table that he didn't remember making and a whinging self-pitying entry in his blog queue (thankfully unpublished) that he didn't remember writing.
He told himself that the blackout was a wake-up call. He had to stop this, it was classic self-destructive behavior. He couldn't live his whole week waiting for Friday, waiting to dream of a man who was dead in his grave and hadn't even returned his feelings when he was alive. He should be recovering from his grief by now; he should be letting Sherlock go, not clinging more tightly to him. The dreams were starting to seem like the only real thing in his life, vibrant and warm while the dull misery of his waking life was taking on the shadowy, distant quality of a dream.
By late afternoon he stood at the bathroom sink, popping the caps of the beers one by one, tipping them until they glugged down the drain. He could feel his shoulders tensing, his whole body revolting, but he doggedly twisted the cap of the whiskey and poured it down the drain as well.
"Right," he told himself sternly. "That's done. Enough now." Then he lay on his bed, shivering and shaking, the bedsit filling with the sour smell of the alcohol he sweated out of his pores.
That Friday night worked as late as he could in the surgery, trying to distract himself. When there was nothing left to do — the final EMR completed and closed and his office tidied — he sighed, letting his head hang wearily for a moment before he started back to the bedsit. He couldn't even call it "home" inside his own mind. Home was a flat on Baker Street, no doubt let to someone else by now, the belongings of two men — one dead and one only half-alive — packed away into boxes by strange hands. Home was Sherlock, and Sherlock was gone. He had severed the last tenuous thread connecting them.
He bypassed the Tube stop and walked back, keeping his head doggedly down as he passed every liquor store. The buzz of the city was white noise in his head, hardly perceptible over the dull roar of his own grief, streetlights pinwheeling from the dampness gathering at the corner of his eyes. He forced himself to put cheese between bread, choking down the cold sandwich, before lying in his bed.
He gritted his teeth, pressing his forearm to his eyes, willing himself to sleep. The first dry sob caught him by surprise, a harsh breath that suddenly turned into something more. Then it was inevitable, unavoidable, as he curled up into himself, his shoulders shaking helplessly under the force of his sobbing.
When it was finally over he turned on his back, wiping the dampness from his face with an angry wrist. "Watson, you git," he snarled at himself. "Pull yourself together, man." He forced himself up for a glass of water, knowing the pounding in his head was pure dehydration this time, unaided by alcohol. Was this the way it was going to be, then?
He thought of endless days stretching out before him. His work at the surgery. The occasional drink with Lestrade, but how long would that last without Sherlock to connect them? Even the dim glimmer of a future that had sustained him after Afghanistan — maybe he would meet someone, have a girlfriend and maybe even a family someday — was gone. He didn't want that anymore and never would, the last vestige of normality burned to ashes by the all-consuming conflagration that had been Sherlock. He thought of the gun in the drawer, suddenly feeling its weight in his hand so vividly that his palm twitched, shocked to find itself empty.
He took in a deep breath, hissing it out slowly between his teeth, and by the time his lungs were empty his mind was made up. He washed his face and dressed carefully, checking his watch. The liquor stores were still open. It was madness what he was doing, but it seemed almost inevitable. Hadn't he cast his lot in with madness from the moment he met Sherlock? He had experienced one night with the prospect of no Sherlock in his life, and already he knew that he couldn't do it. He had this last tenuous thread, and he would grasp it for as long as he could. If it drove him to the bottle, if it drove him to true madness, then that was the chance he would take. That was the future, and this was tonight. And tonight, if he was lucky, he would dream.
He went out to buy a six-pack of beer and a bottle of whiskey, closing the door of the bedsit behind him with finality.
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