AN- This chapter is the longest by far and contains most of the story. I'm glad everyone's been enjoying it, even though it's been causing some feels.
It was rather shocking to both of them when Sherlock lost his words.
John didn't know if he had ever seen that look on his face before. Surprised, shocked, frightened, and somewhat irked. And the tiniest hints of terror.
Sherlock had words still. But they weren't his.
He had to beg, borrow, and steal. It was painful for both of them.
He was bedridden by this point and Mycroft was pushing for around the clock nursing care.
John adamantly refused.
"Not yet," he had said. "I can still take care of him. Not yet."
He was the only one who could understand how Sherlock took phrases from other people and strung them together to make things.
To be honest, John was surprised of the large collection of quotes and phrases Sherlock had gathered over the years.
Perhaps they had their own room in his mind palace, so that when pieces of it began collapsing on itself, Sherlock's language was taken, but the quote room was left untouched.
For now.
Strangely enough, there were a few things left untouched. 'John', 'Idiot', 'Bored', and 'Obvious.' They were the most used. Maybe they never got put away on their proper shelves, and instead floated around inside his head, escaping all the damage.
John did cry. Rarely.
John thought Sherlock was asleep. Thought that he was crying quietly enough that no one would hear. Anyone but Sherlock.
"John," he called out in the dark.
"Yeah?" he sniffed, madly wiping away tears and snot, completely embarrassed.
Sherlock was silent for a second. Processing delay. Searching through stacks of words that weren't his to find ones that could fit.
"Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time."
But John could hear the frustration behind the words.
"Yeah," he whispered. "Yeah it does."
And Sherlock held John's hand until the tears dried up. And then some. For good measure.
"This is actually happening. And it hurts. And it's amazing."
John nodded and smiled, and patted Sherlock on the head while he scowled fiercely.
"If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story." John nodded. "My blog." And the notes I made you take, his eyes said. "I knew you had an ulterior motive for those," John replied, eyes rolling.
"What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering."
"No kidding."
"Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live."
John paused for a moment. "Yeah," he whispered, "I'll try to remember that. Except you know how damn hard it'll be for me."
There was silence. John figured Sherlock was done. But he spoke again, unevenly but urgently. "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is life not a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?"
John squeezed the hand of Sherlock's that he was holding reassuringly.
Yes, he though, yes it was. No wonder you were always complaining about being bored. Perhaps on some level you knew that every day was crucial because it would all end so soon.
Sherlock's psychic listening skills were still entirely intact.
"Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?" John shook his head. "You don't believe in fate." His eyes said but you do.
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."
Lestrade whistled.
"When the hell did you become a bloody philosopher?"
Sherlock only grinned in response.
John liked when Lestrade came over, because he didn't act entirely awkwardly around Sherlock. He did at first, but he was doing better now. John also liked it because he could tell Sherlock enjoyed it.
Even with none of his words, Sherlock still loved proving how much of an idiot Lestrade was. And everyone else too. Donovan and Anderson came by once. It was obvious Lestrade had insisted. Sherlock ignored them entirely.
As soon as they left, after standing there awkwardly, fidgeting and attempting to make conversation for 15 impossibly long minutes, Sherlock informed John, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
There was no protest from John.
He knew the quotes were but a poor substitute for what he was actually thinking. The reason he ignored Anderson and Donovan entirely was because he had no insults good enough. There could be no insults good enough for them save for the ones that came from Sherlock.
"A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ," Sherlock told Mrs Hudson morosely. She patted his hand comfortingly.
"I'll look after him dear, don't you worry."
Sherlock thanked her.
She sang him a song that she would have sung to her own children, if she'd had any.
"One need not be a chamber to be haunted, one need not to be a house. The brain has corridors surpassing material place," he commented to no one in particular one day. Lestrade, Mrs Hudson and John were all present.
Lestrade thought of the drugs and how haunted Sherlock had been when he first met him.
Mrs Hudson thought of the loneliness Sherlock have before John.
John though of Sherlock's mind palace and the state it was in, broken beyond repair.
They all smiled thinly at different things but didn't share.
Sherlock knew.
"You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around and why his parents will always wave back."
John pondered that.
"It's hope," he said simply. "And faith. Faith that they'll come back, and hope that they'll still be there." Sherlock seems to ponder this for a moment.
"Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all." Without even skipping a beat, he launched into his next comment. "Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man."
John gripped Sherlock's hand more tightly, barely, but just.
"Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy," Sherlock whispered to Lestrade one day when he came to visit. John had gone out. Lestrade wasn't entirely sure what it was supposed to mean.
He just sat there with Sherlock for a while, pondering it. And then it came.
"You're talking about John aren't you?"
Sherlock's eyes still conveyed more than most men could in a speech.
"I'll take that as a yes then."
His eyes approved.
"It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."
"Not what that was intended to mean, but it's nice to know you still have a sense of humour."
There was a pause. "Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win."
"Yeah," John said quietly. "Sometimes they do."
Searching, searching...
"Death is when the monsters get you."
"Big Stephen King fan are you? Didn't think you were that type."
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"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."
John scratched his head. "You know, that actually made sense. I'm not sure if I should be concerned about that or not."
Sherlock burst out laughing. John chuckled too. He was a bit concerned about Sherlock thinking this was utterly hilarious, but personality changes he reminded himself. Sherlock calmed down rapidly, and was very serious as he informed John "The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it." John nodded in what he hoped was a sincere manner, although utterly baffled about what Sherlock was getting at.
Perhaps the most fun John had was when Mycroft came to visit. The only time he came to visit in fact.
As soon as Sherlock noticed him, he glared, and whispered to John.
"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."
It took John a good five minutes to catch his breath. Mycroft was not amused.
Mycroft brought up the topic of nursing care.
John relented. Even he knew that he would be no good for Sherlock if he was exhausted.
He could tell Sherlock loathed them. He used his single words that were still left to talk to them. Talk at them.
"Idiot. Obvious. John." The message in that was clear, even if not through the words, definitely through the tone.
John was slightly flattered that Sherlock spoke in quotes to him, and others he was closer to, but not to the nurses. The list was short. John, Mrs Hudson, Lestrade, Molly. Occasionally Mycroft, but only to insult him. So... all the time.
Sherlock would have been pleased.
One day while John was reading to him, something that no doubt would have been determined a waste of time by Sherlock if he still had the words and will to do so, he began seizing.
John took note, just like Sherlock had once asked him to do.
Why, he wasn't sure.
He added another drug to the arsenal that was Sherlock's collection.
When Lestrade came over, he commented that he hoped he wasn't there for a drugs bust, because they would be screwed.
They both laughed uncomfortably.
Lestrade went home and sat on his couch. He pondered for a good hour how John managed to do it. If he had to... well he wasn't sure he could.
Although, he supposed, John probably never thought he could do this until it happened.
That's the way life works.
And it's awful.
"Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go," Sherlock stated one day. John had to leave the room and stand in the kitchen so Sherlock couldn't see him cry.
Sherlock heard though. Saw the signs when he returned. Commented on it. John hated when Sherlock saw him cry. Or when he noticed that he had been crying. "There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and of unspeakable love."
"I have no bloody clue what I'm supposed to do without you."
"In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate."
"Well, yeah, but what move?"
Sherlock was silent. John would have though he'd fallen asleep if it wasn't for the gentle squeeze from his hand.
"John," Sherlock whispered. "Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."
John frowned. He was pretty sure that Sherlock had deleted that movie, and was even more sure that he wouldn't have used those words unless it was for something specific. He preferred philosophers and classic writers to fantasy novels.
He pondered it for a while. It didn't come to him until Sherlock found more words to help him out.
"Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes," which he immediately followed up with "thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind," he offered.
And John had the awful realization. He'd done the reading. He knew it was likely. But it was a part of Sherlock that he didn't think would be touched.
"Sherlock... have you gone blind?"
Sherlock nodded, and whispered "obvious."
John set his head in his hands and willed himself not to cry.
Another sign of an awful decline.
John hated it at the end.
He obviously knew he would, but he didn't expect the rage that he felt towards this disease, for taking this brilliant brain and reducing to to dust. Rage towards the world as a whole. Even towards Sherlock, because John still naively believed that maybe if he'd told him right away, that somehow he could have fixed it.
He hated how Sherlock didn't have words of his own anymore, that the only ones that still remained were ones he had gathered up from various places. Words that could never express the depth of thought and tangled up feelings that John knew existed.
He hated how Sherlock had known he would be reduced to this. Had known it would be a terrible way to die, and yet hadn't asked anything of John. John was thankful for that, knowing that he would have struggled with it, but at the same time absolutely knowing that he would have done it if asked, regardless of the consequences.
But John supposed the rage he felt was better than the agony he could be feeling.
"One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly."
The words were slurred and rasped, no longer connected but stranded on different breaths, but John heard them.
He smiled through the tears, squeezing Sherlock's hand comfortingly.
"Nietzsche," he whispered back.
Sherlock's eyes brightened, pleased with John for recognizing it.
"The rest is silence."
"Hamlet," he whispered with a smile on his face and tears on his cheeks.
And his eyes closed again.
Those were the last words he spoke.
He held on, miraculously, for another week.