A/N: I suggest listening to this watch?v=uy_2B-diV18 while reading. Really helps bring on the feels.

I will stop asking for reviews when John and Sherlock stop being in love. Thanks for reading!

Three Months Later

John

Sherlock's never gotten the milk before. He's never going to do it again.

He's never going to do anything again.

Crown jewels. National banks. Court, testify, Sherlock, run, run, run─

Jim Moriarty. Richard Brook.

That bastard.

He will ruin us.

I am standing in the middle of the road, my neck craned upwards, a cellphone pressed hard against my left ear.

Sherlock is up there.

He's going to do it.

He's going to jump─

He's not going to jump.

He wouldn't─

"Oh god," I say, because it's all I can say right now, all that my throat will allow me to release. This cannot be happening. I must have hit my head all those months ago when Sherlock brought me that carton of milk and all of these events that came after that have been the result of some horrific coma that I fell into─

"I... I... I can't come down so we'll... we'll just have to do it like this." I have never heard him stutter before in the whole time that I've known him, never once heard him falter like this. Never with this much sorrow in his voice.

Wind blows and ruffles the curls on his head. Those goddamn perfect curls.

"What's going on?" I say, even knowing exactly what's going on. My heart threatens to kick a hole straight through my chest and leave me gaping and hollow.

"An apology. It's all true."

"W-what?"

The phone is freezing pressed against my ear, the world is freezing around me with him up there, doing this, saying these words to me. I brace myself as he opens his mouth, says brokenly, "Everything they said about me. I invented Moriarty."

I see as he glances briefly behind him, and I begin to wonder before other thoughts take me over and pull words out of me, senseless words, words that do not mean anything close to what I want to say to this man. "Why are you saying this?"

He looks back down at me. "Because I'm a fake." His voice breaks, and I want to run to him and grab him and hold him to me and never let him go but I'm not working correctly, and all that my mind screams at me is, stay where you are. He told you to stay where you are. Do not move one muscle.

"Sherlock," I say, but the moment rushes by far too fast. He's moved on to other words, and I am that many words closer to being witness to something that is going to break him. Break me. Break us.

"The newspapers were right all along," he says. I hear tears in his voice, can see them in his eyes even from this far away, can feel them like a burn in my heart. "I want you to tell Lestrade. I want you to tell Mrs. Hudson, and Molly... in fact tell anyone that will listen to you that I created Moriarty for my own purposes." He is so horribly emphatic and I know it isn't real, I know─

"Okay, shut up, Sherlock, shut up," my words stumble over each other in my mouth, racing to get out, racing to be said before this is over, "The first time we met... the first time we met you knew all about my sister, right?"

"Nobody could be that clever─"

"You could."

I am emphatic now, too, just as much as he was, because I know. This man before me, this brilliant, beautiful, wonderful man─he could. He could be anything. He could be everything. He is everything.

He is my everything.

Sherlock laughs (not a laugh of mirth. A laugh of desperation, of hopelessness, and my god─) and I see a tear run down the side of his face, dripping and then falling, falling, falling down to the pavement below. I close my eyes before it hits. Listen to the rawness of his words. "I researched you. Before we met I discovered everything that I could to... to impress you." His voice, always so strong, always so sure, always in control, wobbles again. Is small. And that scares me more than almost anything else in this moment. "It's a trick. Just a magic trick."

I am shaking my head over and over again as if the action will clear his words, his position, the last three months. As if there really is a magic trick that he can do, one that I set off by shaking my head, one that will take us back to when he was braving Tesco lines for me and I was being held by him in our flat, warm and safe and─

"No." I say, and my voice sounds harsh and it hurts me. "Alright, stop it now." I forget my resolve to stay where I am and take a step forward. To him. Red lights are flashing behind my eyes, alarms and ringing through my ears, and I want to grab him and hold his head to my chest─

"No stay exactly where you are!" he says and he's so urgent. Stay. I stop dead in my tracks. Maybe if I stay it will fix it. "Don't move."

I step back and my hand drifts up to him of its own accord, every part of my being screaming to get closer to him. "All right." It's a stupid thing to say. I expect him to tell me so.

(I want him to tell me so. I want him to come down here on the fucking steps and press me to him and tell me I'm an idiot.)

His chest is hitching under his billowing coat. Up, down, up, down, fast, and his own arm is stretched toward mined. I imagine a string that leads from my hand to his, connecting us, keeping us tethered. An unbreakable string. I want to hold his hand.

It hits me hard, there in the road. All the things that I want are him.

"Keep your eyes fixed on me," he says, and his voice is rising with panic. Frantic. Almost hysterical. The hand that he has extended to mine trembles. "Please, will you do this for me?"

I will do anything for you, Sherlock Holmes. "Do what?"

"This phone call, it's... it's my note. It's what people do, don't they?" he asks this plaintively, and I am reminded forcibly of Moriarty in that swimming pool screaming that's what people do! "Leave a note?"

I shake my head and lift the phone slightly away from ear, not wanting to hear what he's saying to me. I understand everything for once. I wonder if this is how he constantly feels, overwhelmed and anguished and broken─ I raise it again and when I speak, my voice is shaking.

"Leave a note when?" I ask him, even though I know. He likes when I ask questions, I think almost absently. He likes it.

There is a pause. I become aware of the strangest things: the sound of traffic behind me. The slap of sneakered feet on pavement. The scuttle of dried out leaves rushing down the road in the wind.

The angle of the man's face above me, his head tilted to the side, the corners of his perfect lips turned down, the shaking of all of him.

"Goodbye, John," he says.

It is soft. Gentle. Apologetic. It is a gift to me from him, I know. A gesture of kindness, of friendship. Like the milk. But it does the opposite of what it's intended to do and I feel a jolt run through me, as if someone has shot me with a bolt of electricity. I'm shaking my head again. "No. Don't." My words spill out. Futile.

Sherlock stares at me. His piercing eyes are softened, rimmed with light pink, and there are tears on his smooth skin. Our eyes meet and I feel him, know him. Like I always have. Like I have since the day that I met him.

My heart is pounding harder than it ever has, working its way up, up, up

He tosses the phone behind him onto the roof.

I form words but they will not break free.

His gaze is raised to the skyline. Away from me.

"No," I say, and then I am screaming louder than I ever have before, louder than I ever did during Afghanistan, louder than I ever have at night, screaming with every single fiber of my being, screaming my heart out into the cold air, "SHERLOCK!"

He spreads his arms to either side.

He falls.

"Sher..." But my body will not allow me to form another word. I watch as he falls gently, gracefully, that goddamn coat flowing out behind him and around him and I think that maybe it will catch him, maybe it will stop him, and then his limbs wheel when he is just feet from the pavement and my mind is a blank slate of white noise, nothing but Sherlock Sherlock Sherlock Sherlock SherlockSherlockSherlocksherlocksherlocksherlocksherlocksherlocksherlock─

He hits the ground.