It was a Tuesday. To most, it would be like any other Tuesday. For John, it would be the day he finally got to talking to the oncologist he had picked. Doctor Ford was the lead on his case, flying to London all the way from Texas, in America. To say John was nervous was to say that grass was green. Marty, from the surgery he worked at, suggested that someone should go with John to the appointment, to be there for support. It sounded like a great idea, until John really thought about it. Sherlock would scoff at the idea, claiming his lack of sentiment and his dislike of social situations that dealt with such his emotions. Mrs. Hudson would likely be in worse shape than John himself, clinging to him and crying that he was too young to die. Lestrade was the kind of friend you went to the pub with, not the one you took to your cancer appointments.
So, Tuesday morning, John dug out his old tape recorder from the back of his desk drawer. Eight days after his original diagnosis, three days after he accepted that he would die before he had originally imagined, the doctor had decided he was in this alone. Emotionally, at least. Sure, Sherlock had gone as far as calling Mycroft for help, but the two of them wanted to keep the detective's only friend around. Mrs. Hudson burst into tears just about every time she saw him; there was hardly any way to get a word in around it. His most recently girlfriend had dumped him an hour after he had told her the news. She had done it in a text.
John watched himself in the mirror as he buttoned up his old red plaid shirt. He had bags under his eyes from the lack of sleep he had gotten the night before. He looked the same as ever. There were no signs of the beast in his chest, there didn't seem to be any change when he looked at himself. That part was one of the weirder parts. Shouldn't he look different, feel different, act different? All that had changed was the acceptance of certain death, and the occasional coughing fit.
Part of him hoped that the original diagnosis was wrong.
All of him knew it wasn't.
Half past noon, the doctor ran a hand through his hair and got to his feet. Dread was filling in his stomach as he bid goodbye to both his flatmate and landlady. John, in his last ditch attempt to have some control over his life, hailed a taxi. The cab ride seemed to take forever, although the road was less than jammed with traffic.
Walking the halls of Bart's was a strange feeling without Sherlock at his side. Not heading towards the morgue or Molly's lab was weird too. John took the lift up to level five, shuffling about to the front desk. He couldn't see the sick patients or smell the unfortunately familiar smell of death, but he could feel the negativity. The three people sitting in waiting chairs all looked different from him, and from each other. The elderly man was reading a magazine, relaxed back against the chair. If it weren't for the oxygen tank beside him, John would have thought him to be in good shape. The middle-aged woman looked like she had a cold, or perhaps some other virus. That gave him hope. The younger man, the one about John's age, was the one who frightened him most. His cheeks were sunken and his eyes were dark. His skin was ghastly pale and it seemed that if he moved too much at once, he would snap in half.
After signing in to the front desk, John was sent to a room at the end of the corridor. His doctor was already there, waiting for him and making notes on his clipboard.
"Ah, Doctor Watson," The tall man greeted, stepping up from his seat and holding out his hand. He had a strong grip, John noted. "I'm Doctor Ford, but please, call me Sawyer."
"As long as you call me John." He countered, taking the seat opposite the large mahogany desk. Having been on the other side of the desk so many times, John had earlier been confident that he would have this meeting in the bag. It was only as they sat there in momentary silence that he realised his diagnoses of colds and broken ankles had nothing on this.
"So, John, before we begin, do you have any questions?" Doctor Ford asked, brushing his long golden-blond hair from his face. The man looked like a classic Californian surfer, not one of the highest-ranking oncologists in the world from Texas. Shaking his head, John pulled out the tape recorder and turned it on as the other began to talk about lung cancer in great detail. More than John had ever heard before. If Marty's suggestion of stage 3 cancer was correct, things weren't looking too great for him.
"We'll be doing a bronchoscopy for confirmation. It's easily and painless. All you'll end up with is a sore throat for a couple days," Eying John's confused expression, the doctor continued. "A bronchoscopy is a tiny tube that can give us a nice view of your airways and lungs. I'll use a flexible one, that way if there are any tumors, I can take a biopsy of it. With that biopsy, results will be known in mere days. As soon as we figure out exactly what this is, the sooner we can set up a plan to combat it. And, of course, the sooner we combat it, your chances of a long life rise greatly."
The doctor explained every tiny little detail of the bronchoscopy and the tests that followed. From the chest exam that followed, and the excruciatingly long look at the x-rays from before, Sawyer frowned and made more notes on his little clipboard. The silence was eating John alive. Slowly.
"Unfortunately, it looks like your associate, Doctor Steinbrook, was correct in his analysis."
John's chest felt hollow. After the surprisingly quick bronchoscopy and biopsy, his chest felt scratchy.
Their conversation didn't last much longer after that.
The next two days flew by before John could count them. Between three different crime scenes (all by the same murderer, thankfully) and a long day and a half at the surgery, John was ready to sleep for days on end. Alas, that plan didn't work out so well. His alarm went off loud and far too close to his head. John jumped to his feet when he remembered what that alarm meant. Everything revolved around this day. These test results were either going to confirm his damnation, or relieve him of impossible stress.
Sherlock, again, offered no words of comfort or encouragement as John sat in his chair and tugged on his shoes. As much as he didn't expect it, he was almost hoping for it. Stupid of him, of course. There was no way Sherlock would do that in the first place, let alone when he was acting as if nothing was going on. The detective sat and complained about John's boring tan jumper, and hissed about an experiment not going the way he wanted it to, and the complete lack of critical thinkers on the police force.
Between his flatmate's utter normalcy and trying to avoid his inconsolable landlady, John was nearly late for his appointment. The traffic was jammed as ever, and it seemed as if he had gotten the one cab in London that Sherlock hadn't gotten in before. Which was a good thing, actually, because the driver didn't take him the long way about or charged him extra as payback. It would have been a nice ride, if the destination had been a different one.
John took his time getting up to the fifth floor. He had stopped the cab a block away, wanting to walk the rest of the way, even if that meant he would end up in the lobby with a coughing fit clinging to his chest. There was no way he was going to give up walking short distances just because his body refused to agree with him on it. Deciding the stairs were a little too much for him this time, John took the lift back up to level five and once again signed in at the front desk before walking down the hall to the now familiar office.
He froze with his hand just a few centimeters from the handle. He couldn't do this. How could John just walk into his death sentence like this? No, no, not like this. No one would stop him if he just turned around and went back to the flat and made tea and went to acting like everything was back to normal. Sure, Mrs. Hudson would be different around him and Mycroft would probably try to force him into treatment and Sherlock would give him looks that told him he wasn't good enough to be his assistant anymore, but he'd still have everything together. He'd have his life together. Maybe he didn't cry during the first meeting, or in the two days since (the first days he hadn't fallen asleep crying since he found out the news), but that didn't hold much promise for this meeting.
Finally after three minutes of standing stock-still in front of the door, he caved and opened it. Sawyer was already standing and leaning against his desk, a file open in his hands.
"Hello, John, sit, please." He greeted, glancing up from the documents just for a moment before going back to his reading. Doing as he was told, John sat in the same chair as last time. Pulling out the recorder again, he waited nervously, rubbing his sweaty palms on his pants.
Coughing a little and taking the time of silence to look around the room, John noticed that the man managed to bring along a few photos from America. From what it looked like, Doctor Ford had a wife and two children. The problem was, in one of the pictures, one of the two children was in a hospital bed. It all became obvious after that. He was so passionate about research and treatments for cancer because his son had cancer. And died from it, by looking at the picture of him, his wife and only one son. When the doctor was finally sitting in his seat and setting down the file, John tried to look as though he hadn't figured it all out. It worked, apparently.
"John, I've got bad news."
John's heart sunk. Through his stomach and to his toes, John's body was going numb. It shouldn't be surprised; hell, he had already come to the conclusion that he was sick. But this, this was stone cold confirmation. There was no going back. He couldn't turn and walk out that door and pretend like those words were never said. He couldn't go back to running around with Sherlock and pretending that the day he keeled over would be from a crazy murderer sticking around a scene.
Nodding at the appropriate times, all the information he was receiving was going through one ear and out the other. Good thing he brought the tape recorder again. Dully, he noted that the doctor mentioned that it wasn't from smoking, or second hand smoke even. He could have guessed that easily. The poor air of London and the dry land of Afghanistan had done him all kinds of wrong. John had left the war with more than just a gunshot wound, apparently. It wasn't completely uncommon for soldiers to come back with infections or off kilter diseases, the problem was when they didn't get it diagnosed and treated.
How was he supposed to react to this? A few websites told him the typical response was the five stages of grief, but he felt like he was going about it all wrong. He definitely denied it as much as possible, but he hadn't been overly angry about it. There was no bargaining. Depression seemed to be littered with confusion more than actual sadness, and he had already come to accept an early death. He had lived through the Afghan war, and his own personal war in London. Now he was at war with himself. The thought of living to a ripe old age had never occurred to him. Having kids and a wife and a nice little home in the country were long forgotten. He hadn't considered that life since before he sighed up for the military.
So, John sat there. Listening to explanations of surgery and chemotherapy and radiation therapy. He didn't comment on anything, he just nodded and made the appropriate sounds needed. Tears didn't come; anger and fury didn't stop by. It was really nothing like he expected. John just felt like an empty shell of himself.
What was Sherlock going to do without him? The man could barely function like a normal human being even with John's help. He didn't know how he did it before, and Lord help him if he were to go without the constant reminders of ordinary things. Half the time John had to remind him to eat or sleep before he passed out, once he had even had to tell him to start breathing again. Sherlock wasn't going to be able to afford the rent at Baker Street anymore. Where would he go? Would he find another flatmate and start over again? Would there be a new John Watson at his side? Perhaps he could find someone in better shape, without an imaginary bum leg and a wanky shoulder. Knowing him, he'd never accept help from Mrs. Hudson or Lestrade or Mycroft on finding a new flat. He'd continue on, alone as ever, claiming his body transport and the rest of the world idiotic.
Harry would probably be in too much of a drunken stupor to make it to his funeral. It had taken him three days to even contact her and tell her that he had cancer.
A small little funeral. That'd be nice. A handful of friends from the surgery and the Yard and maybe even some of his old military buddies. John reminded himself to make a comment in his will about being cremated instead of buried.
With a start, John shook his head and sighed, rubbing his hand through his hair and going back to listening to the oncologist. He was getting ahead of himself. Sawyer had barely finished telling him about what 'stage 3' even meant. His tumor was seven centimeters and there were a few tiny ones on his lymph nodes on the same side of his chest as the larger tumor. 3A, it was called. Easy for surgery, but it needed to be shrunk down first.
John would be good for chemotherapy, Sawyer had told him. He was young and fit and strong and had proven himself to be a fast healer.
Instead of paying a huge amount of attention to the specifics of what the chemo would do to him, he compiled a list of questions.
"It's a good thing we caught this at the early start of stage 3, because if it had gotten to stage 4, things would be a lot more difficult for us," Sawyer told him, crossing his legs and taking a long glance at John's medical records in the file he had been reading earlier. John had spaced out so long that he hadn't caught that earlier. Sherlock would be disappointed. "Well, I think that's all we need to talk about for today. Any questions for me before you go, John?"
Only one popped into the forefront of his mind.
"How long do I have to live?" John frowned, looking up from his hands on his knees to his doctor.
"Best case scenario? No more than five years. Most common like expectancy at this stage? Fifteen months."
A/N - First, thanks to: cancer dot gov, cancerhelp dot org, and medicinenet dot com, my research materials. Second, thanks to everyone who has favorited/alerted the last chapter. I'd like to ask for a few more reviews, though, just to make sure that you guys like this. Sadly, it might be four or five days until the next chapter, but I'll try to write and post as fast as possible. I'll try to write/post some Wonderland in the meantime!