A/N: Sorry no update yesterday, Mycroft found the cheesecake. I'm home sick today, so there might be two today to make up for it. This one is a bit longer than I wanted it to be (because I don't like it much) but whatever. Enjoy.

Word Count: 1,000+

Pairing(s): John/Sherlock, hint of MorMor

Warning(s): lots of angst, mentions of violence, Sherlock kills people, references to suicide

Gone

Sherlock Holmes was not a man prone to missing people. Then again, he wasn't prone to falling in love, either. John had changed him in more ways than one.

He tried to deny it, the loneliness that came with being away from John, but he couldn't. There was a gaping hole inside him now, a persistent agony, demanding to be felt through every aspect of Sherlock's existence.

When Sherlock woke up in the morning it was to a noticeable emptiness on the other side of the bed. There was no forehead to kiss, no affectionate grumble that it was too early. There was no one to tell Sherlock to go to sleep in the first place, though, and eventually Sherlock stopped sleeping except in random bursts whenever he passed out from exhaustion.

When Sherlock played violin in the middle of the night, there was the creeping knowledge that no one was complaining about it not because they were amazingly compliant and loved him and his musical quirks but because there was no one there to complain even if they wanted to. Eventually Sherlock stopped playing – the new violin wasn't the same, anyway.

When Sherlock went out to do The Job – not the work; untangling the web was not the Work. The Work filled him up inside; this Job was empty and painful and he wanted nothing more than for it to end – it was alone. When he snuck through a base or an alley, there was no breath on his neck, no one peering over his crouching form; when he took chase, there was no pounding of footsteps behind him, no one to turn and tell to keep up; when Sherlock caught up to whoever he was chasing, there was no one to hold him back or to urge him on, no one to have his back when there were conflicts. Sherlock tried to stop thinking about that, had to remind himself to look over his shoulder, because without John no one was watching for him.

When Sherlock killed someone – he didn't realize it until he'd done it, but he'd never killed anyone before, not directly – there was no one to help him clear away the body. There was no one to help wash the blood off of Sherlock's hands, no one to kiss the tears off Sherlock's cheeks; there was certainly no one to tell Sherlock it was OK that he felt nothing for the men and women whose lives he had ended, no one to reassure him that he wasn't evil, wasn't a machine. When Sherlock removed the last of the incriminating evidence against himself from each cut string of the web, Sherlock wondered if John would have done all of those things or if he would be rejected for this. He wondered if John would have had a better solution.

When Sherlock returned to the flat each night there was no one to ask him where he'd been, no strangely affectionate comment on the blood on his shirt, no one to praise Sherlock on another job well done, no bad television in the background. There was no smell of Earl Gray tea and jam and John; there was no pleasant humming in the other room as Sherlock hacked his way through the internet, no one to kiss his neck and tell him he was working too hard. There was no quiet reassurance that Sherlock was human and, in a way, Sherlock soon forgot that he was.

When Sherlock got hungry there was no one to make him eat; he barely noticed himself, and the strangers in his picture frame were hardly going to remind him. There was no off-handed comment about how he was losing a lot of weight; the cabinets remained empty and the milk carton had not been replaced in nearly a year. Sherlock went to the supermarket exactly once after the Fall and saw a woman having a row with a self check-out machine; there was no one to tell Sherlock that he couldn't live properly on take-out every other week and no one to scrape him off the ground when he collapsed from malnutrition and exhaustion.

When Sherlock got shot by a well-trained sniper with a serious grudge and a bleeding heart, there was no one to stitch him up, no one to force him to go to the hospital. There was no one to stop him from ignoring the pain and running after the man, from shooting the sniper more times than necessary and feeling nothing. There was no one to be glad that he was still alive once he recovered, no one to assure him that he even was alive anymore. There was no one to tell him whether or not it was strange that, even as he dug the bullet out of his own wound and stitched his own skin, he was thinking of John Watson and his lovely smile.

Even within his own mind palace Sherlock could not escape it. It blared throughout his entire brain like the shriek of a fire alarm, if fire alarms could punch you in the gut.

Still, Sherlock could not return. Never mind that he needed John, loved him even. Never mind that John was miserable without him. Never mind that every day spent apart was agonizing. There was nothing that could be done. At the end of the day, as long as the web was still intact Sherlock had to stay dead.

If there was one thing to be said about James Moriarty, it was that he kept his promises.

So Sherlock kept on living, if you could call it that, careful to keep the veil of death over him for three long years. Days came and went, strings were cut, and bridges were burned. It came to a point where the only thing keeping Sherlock going was knowing that John was OK. That out there, somewhere, the love of his life was alive and well and that, eventually, if he fought hard enough, they would find each other again. It never occurred to Sherlock that John didn't even have that – that John thought he was dead, that he made John think that he was gone forever – until he received the text. Being a sociopath could do that, Sherlock supposed.

It came on a Tuesday.

From: Mycroft Holmes
To: Sherlock Holmes
It doesn't matter to me, but there are several signs that John is considering suicide. On the chance that you have faked your death, I would recommend fixing this, brother dearest. You've left quite the hole in London. –MH

For once, Sherlock was quick to take Mycroft's advice.

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