AN - So… I'm trying out second person, and I'm loving it. Hope you like it as well. Thanks for the song - I hadn't heard it before, but I love it. Keep on sending the prompts, guys. This one actually gave me a ton of ideas, so I'm actually thinking of turning this into a larger work, once I finish the one I've got in progress. Anyways, hope you like the ficlet, and hope you don't get triggered easily...

Unintended ~ anon

TW - mentions of self-harm, suicidal thoughts, drug abuse.

It is quiet.

The silence is stifling, and it is constant.

It is there when you wake up, pressing the air from your lungs. You cannot scream.

It is there when you fall asleep, filling your dreams and shaping your nightmares. You do not want to sleep. But you do.

It is there when you want to forget, reminding you, whispering his absence in your ears. You need to forget. You do not want to need to forget. But a needle helps you, and you do.

He would be disappointed. If he knew. He would be disappointed in what you are. In what you've become. In what you did while you were away and in what you let happen to you and in all the times you didn't take the chance to come home. He would be more disappointed than in all the times you didn't care, all the times you got things wrong, all the times you hurt him, if he knew.

But he doesn't know.

So you live without the pain of his disappointment and continue to exist with the weight of your hatred of yourself. You hate yourself for everything he would be disappointed in and more. You hate yourself for hurting him. You hate yourself for not being enough for him. You hate yourself for caring.

You want to stop caring.

But you can't.

The quiet brings with it a darkness. This darkness is both physical and mental. Emotional. In any state, it is thick and it is persistent in its mission to take over you. You cannot escape it. The darkness fills the flat like water, drowning you, slowly but surely drowning you. It grows inside you like a cancer, using up all the space in your lungs so there's no room for air and breathing becomes impossible.

You know how dangerous the darkness is. You do not fight it. If you let it consume you, you will die. That, you are sure of. But still, as it spreads, as it takes over you, as it becomes you, you make no effort to fight it.

He does not want you to die. You know how much it hurt him the last time, and you could never do that to him again. You wouldn't have don't it the at all, if you'd known how much it would hurt him.

But every day, breathing becomes a more and more arduous task, until it takes all you have to just continue doing it.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale.

Exhale.

You cannot stop. You want to, but you can't. Darkness. Quiet. Breathing. All of these are more torturous than what they did to you. But you will live with them. You have to. For him.

To say that you miss him would be an understatement of massive proportions. You do not know how you continue to live with the emptiness, the darkness and the quiet, the dust he left behind. It left a hole inside you that you can feel in your chest, and it hurts. You do not know how to stop it.

You still see him. He comes to see you, and, when he does, you do your best to clean up and not leave shards of your shattered life in plain view. Sometimes, his wife comes. She smiles like she never did anything wrong and he looks at her like she's his whole world, and in that look, you feel your world crumble down around you.

He comes to help on a case one day. You're at the Yard, and Lestrade asks John about the baby.

She's very healthy, has a strong heartbeat, and is due in two weeks. He can't wait.

You try to bury yourself in the evidence, in your work, so maybe no one will notice that the prospect of new life is killing you.

But the work has become just that - work. You find no pleasure in solving crimes when he's not by your side half the time, and when he is, he leaves early or his mind is at home with his wife and baby. That day, a smile appears on his face that he hasn't worn at cases in far too long. His eyes shine with the thought of his child. You stare at him for a few seconds, you remember the first time you saw that smile, and you leave.

You do not plan to go back. They can continue just fine without you, they can carry on as if you were never there - they'll have to. You do not want to go back.

You do not go back.

But he comes to you.

He comes up the stairs and he's inside your flat before you've had a chance to prepare yourself for being seen by him, so he sees you when you're left open with the shards of your heart littering the floor as you try to resist the urge to unzip your veins and paint yourself red.

He sees you.

And he knows.

There is a syringe on the table you hadn't even tried to hide. He wasn't supposed to come back to the flat. He wasn't supposed to see you like this, ever. He would be repulsed. Disgusted. He would leave and he would never come back, and you don't know if it would be worse to live with him with the wife and the baby or lose him completely and feel less guilty about laying yourself to rest.

You watch him as he looks around the flat, a vague gleam of disbelief settling in his eyes. You turn your head down before you see it change. You don't want to see the look on his face when he sees you've returned to the needle. You don't want to see the fire in his eyes when he realises what you are now. So you just wait to hear him slam the door.

You do not expect him to kneel in front of you. You do not expect to look up to see the softness in his face, and in the gleam of his eye you don't see pity. You see pain. Worry. There is no pity in his movements as he takes your arm and pulls up your sleeve. You want to fight - your brain is screaming at you to fight, but you don't. You let him see the pinpricks and the scars. And it hurts more than you can bear, but there's nothing you can do and you know it.

"I'm sorry," you breathe.

You feel his eyes on your face. Your head is still turned down.

He shakes his head. "What for?"

You bite your lip a little. You want to run. You want to pull your arm away and pull down your sleeve and run out of the flat, run, run, run until you're out of London, run until there's no more land for your feet to fall on and until your lungs are screaming for an amount of air you can't give them and you can't do anything but collapse and leave the conscious world for a time. But you cannot run from this. You know that.

"For everything. For this - for the drugs and the scars. For lying to you. For hurting you. For never being enough for you. For not caring enough. For caring too much. For loving you when I know you'll never love me. For dying. For living. For destroying your life like I destroy everything I ever touch. I'm sorry."

The words are hoarse, they scratch your throat and resist passing through your lips, as if your whole body is screaming at you for saying so much, for saying the wrong thing, for somehow ruining something that was already ruined.

"I'm sorry."

The words are little more than shaped breath.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

You say it over and over, you want to apologise for everything you've done wrong and more, you know you do not deserve his forgiveness and you do not expect it but still the words fall from your mouth.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

And then the words are quite suddenly stolen from your lips. Taken away by a soft breath and a press of a warm mouth against yours. A hand strays to your neck, the back of your head, your hair. His lips are gentle and his breath is hot and you find yourself letting him invade your space and your mouth like he invaded your life and you know he decimated it, he destroyed it, he took the pleasure out of everything you loved by only taking himself away, but still you let him. He shouldn't be allowed to do that. He shouldn't have been able to just destroy you by living by your side for a few years. He shouldn't be able to destroy you by accident. But he did. And still you let him. And you know that his tongue and his mouth and his hands on you, against you, they are dangerous and they will destroy you in the way that the sea destroys the shore, because he will leave again and if he returns, he will destroy you even more, you know that when he leaves, he will take with him your ability to breathe, but you don't care. He is with you now, he is kissing you now, he is showing that he might love you now, and so you don't care.

It is cold, when he pulls away. You didn't realise you'd slipped your arms around his waist until you find yourself weakly trying to pull him closer again. You need him closer again. He is almost pushing you, not quite pushing you - you are sure it would hurt less if he'd see it through and just push you away, yelling about a mistake he made in a moment of desperation when a dream that never could make its way into reality seemed to be possible. You are sure it would hurt less if he laughed at you, if he belittled you and made you see that you are a fool - you know you are a fool - if he told you that he was messing with you, that he hates you. You are sure it would hurt less if he would just hate you.

But he doesn't.

And it hurts.

He rises to his feet, turns his back. He's shaking his head, hiding his face because that amount of vulnerability is too much for even a soldier to bear, let alone display. You sit on the floor, still, silent.

You are cold.

When he turns to face you, you don't know whether he is angry or distraught or disappointed. He could be none of those things, he could be all of those things, he could hate you right now, he could love you more than ever before right now, you don't know. He doesn't know, either. So you turn your eyes to the floor and let him work it out first.

There is quiet.

It is cold.

The empty space between you is not empty at all, you think. You can feel it between you as you stare blankly at the floor, you can feel it, stiff and full of unspoken words and wishes and whispers that smother all sound that might pass from his lips to you. The wall of empty space is as strong as the silence that binds this room.

After a moment that might have been a second that might have been a minute that might have been hours and hours and hours, you look up at him. You meet his eye, and you flinch. You do not turn your head down. If he loves you, you must give him something more than a weak, ruined wreck to love. It takes every ounce of energy you can muster to drag your eyes back to his face. He gazes back at you.

You break the silence that has stretched out too long and too loud for your liking.

"Leave."

The flurry of emotions pass his features in less than a second, but you catch each one. Each one is a stab to your frail heart, but you take time to evaluate every one of them in your mind's eye.

Without a word, he leaves.

Within ten minutes, you let your hungry veins choke on a needle, and you find a world where the pain is numbed and peace does not require death.

You know these are false feelings.

You do not care.