Chapter Text
It was January twenty-ninth, 2013, and John Watson was seated on a bench outside of Barts Hospital, trying very hard not to cry.
The first year after Sherlock died, John could barely even think about the twenty-ninth, let alone commemorate the date in any significant manner. He had hoped the day would come and go like all the others had since Sherlock’s death—empty and precarious, with little thoughts of Sherlock sending him into unpredictable tailspins. It was miserable, but at least the misery was consistent. Instead, he had spent the day in such a funk that the other doctors at the surgery kindly suggested to him that he take the rest of the day off. For you, they had said, but the subtext was clear: for your patients, who you are in no fit condition to see. He had taken them up on the offer and spent the remainder of the day with a bottle of whiskey, which—in retrospect—had been poor company.
This year, John figured he had a better handle on the day. It had been over a year since Sherlock died, after all, and the misery had a less acute edge to it, a dull knife that couldn’t quite cut you unless you pressed very hard. John did his best not to press particularly hard. Still, he took the day off from the surgery and purposefully silenced his mobile. He hadn’t meant to do anything in particular except stare at a wall and do his best not to get through the whole of his whiskey, but instead he found himself downtown. Sitting on a bench outside of Barts Hospital. Staring directly across the street at the pavement that caught Sherlock’s fall. Trying very, very hard not to cry.
It was odd, he thought as he stared at the building and blinked back tears, that he was mentally celebrating the anniversary of first meeting a man who—at face value—was never anything more than a mate to him. They were close, certainly. Very close. And although they had been through quite a lot together in the twenty-two months they had known each other, it was still only twenty-two months. John had mates die in Afghanistan who he knew for much longer and with whom he had been through just as much, and he couldn’t tell you the date he first met them if you put a gun to his head.
“Well,” a voice said beside him, “I wasn’t exactly an ordinary person, now was I?”
John pinched his eyes shut. Right.
The day was bright but chilly, the January air stinging John's skin. John zipped his jacket to his chin and tried to ignore the cold of the bench pressing into his legs. The street was busy—cars whizzing along the road, busting passers-by on the pavement. There was some busker somewhere, the kind with an electric fiddle, playing a rendition of These Foolish Things. John wasn’t fully sure where they were positioned, but the notes rang through the air as if somehow coming from everywhere.
A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces
An airline ticket to romantic places
And still my heart has wings...
John opened his eyes. Barts still stood in front of him, towering large and white against the London cityscape. Although over a year had passed, John still knew down to the meter the exact spot where Sherlock hit the pavement. Sherlock’s blood had long since been washed away by time and the elements, so thoroughly erased that not even a bloodhound would know that he was once there, but John still thought he could see traces of red sometimes. At the moment, however, a street preacher—some evangelical nutter—had set up shop just at the spot of Sherlock’s death. He had an overflowing beard and a tattered Bible in hand and periodically yelled at passers-by about the merits of prayer. Waiting for a miracle, his well-worn vest read, and John seriously considered standing up and paying him fifty quid just to move, just to step one meter to the left or right. He hated that the man was standing on the spot where Sherlock died, and he did not find himself particularly keen on miracles at the moment.
However, John wasn’t here to think about the day Sherlock died. No, he was here—apparently—to think about the day they met.
Afghanistan or Iraq?
John smiled, and it hurt. “How did you know about Afghanistan?”
“I’ve already told you that,” came the voice beside him. “Boring.”
“I know,” John said. “I just like to hear you explain it all out. All your little deductions, all in a row.”
“It’s less impressive once it’s all spelled out,” the voice said. “It spoils the magic.”
“Not to me,” John said. “I always found it extraordinary.”
“Well,” the voice was smiling, “you were always exceedingly easy to impress.”
John smiled again. It still hurt.
This just sort of happened from time to time. John started it as a therapeutic technique that Ella suggested, picturing Sherlock sitting right in front of him so he could say all the things that he’d wanted to say to him in life but never got the chance. It had taken a while for John to get the hang of it, but as it turned out he had quite a bit he’d wanted to say to Sherlock. He said it all and then some, but it didn’t exactly make him feel any better, and at the end of the exercise it turned out that Sherlock was a bit reluctant to leave. So Sherlock came and went, just as he did when he was alive, popping into John’s consciousness whenever he pleased and in complete disregard for convenience.
“Look up to the heavens,” the street-preacher shouted to nobody in particular. “Look up to the heavens and rejoice.”
“I don’t suppose,” John said, “you’ve managed to find a way to stop being dead?”
“I’m afraid not, John,” Sherlock said.
John nodded. He swallowed. “Doesn’t hurt to ask.”
“Yes it did,” Sherlock said.
And John nodded again, because of course Sherlock was right. It had hurt like hell.
John might’ve gone inside Barts. On the auspices of paying Molly a visit or saying hello to Mike, he could have managed to find his way into the lab, that dim, cluttered room where he first saw the face of the man who managed to change the whole of his life in a single day. Still, he wasn’t sure what he would have done once he was actually inside, and the thought of standing in the middle of the lab at Barts, staring at a space that Sherlock would never occupy again, seemed heartbreaking. Hell, sitting outside on this bench was heartbreaking enough.
l play the violin when I’m thinking. Sometimes I don't talk for days on end. Would that bother you?
“Why were those the facts you chose to share with me?” John asked. “Playing the violin and not talking for days on end? Do you really think that’s the worst about you?”
Sherlock shrugged. “Seemed like information you ought to know. So you could make an informed decision about becoming flatmates.”
“Not exactly the worst bits about living with you, though,” John said. “What about, I’ll store body parts next to the jam? Or what about, I’ll get blood all over the flat after an experiment wherein I harpoon a pig? Or what about, I’ll drug my flatmate’s coffee just for shits and giggles?”
“I certainly couldn’t predict I would do all of those things,” Sherlock said. “I thought it was best that I stick to the most probable irritating qualities.”
“They’re not even that irritating,” John said, “the qualities you went with. I liked the violin. It was lovely, even at half-three in the morning.”
As if on cue, the busker’s music seemed to increase in volume.
You came
You saw
You conquered me
“And the not-talking bit?” John continued, doing his best to ignore the violin and what it happened to be doing to his insides at the moment. “For days on end? Not once. You talked constantly, Sherlock. Constantly.”
“Problem?” Sherlock asked.
“No,” John said. “Well, sometimes. But mostly no.” He risked a glance at Sherlock. In his mind, Sherlock was always wearing one of those posh suits of his, the ones that seemed exceedingly expensive and well-tailored, the ones that John wouldn’t dream of wearing himself. The ones he’d sometimes wondered about seeing crumpled up on his bedroom floor. Today, Sherlock wore his Belstaff as well—it was cold out, after all—with his scarf tucked around his neck and his curls fluttering in the breeze. It looked so normal to see him that for a moment it was hard for John to believe that he wasn’t really there at all.
“It’s silent now that you’re gone,” John said. He turned to face Barts. The street-preacher was taking a break from his sermon, but he was still standing there on the pavement, taking up the space that ought to be reserved for only Sherlock, waiting for a miracle that would never come. “I hate the bloody silence.”
Sherlock turned to consider him. “I know,” he said.
John looked over at Sherlock, and what was most unfair was how John could still picture his bloody eyes, those blue eyes that held an intelligence John could never quite fathom even if he were given lifetimes to do so, that could communicate kindness or violence depending on the way they flickered, that stared lifelessly out at nothing as Sherlock’s broken body lay on the pavement, just a few meters away from where John sat. John’s own eyes, at the moment, burned like hell and it felt as if his throat were closing up. His efforts not to cry on a bench outside of Barts Hospital were about to fail spectacularly.
Erupting in a flurry, as if from out of nowhere, a woman appeared at John’s left. She was cheerful and bubbling and wore a knit cap over unruly hair. She shoved a clipboard into John’s face.
“Care to sign the petition to save the Lauriston building?” she asked.
“Christ,” John said, jumping in surprise and nearly knocking the clipboard from her hand. He glanced at Sherlock, who of course was not there. John wiped at his eyes, trying to appear like a man who was not about to break into tears in public.
“They’re set to demolish the building this week,” the girl said, seemingly ignorant of John’s current emotional state. “I’m a volunteer with London’s historical society, and we’re trying to save it. Get it preserved. Too much of our city’s history is being torn down, don’t you think?”
John glanced at the spot on the pavement where Sherlock died. “Yeah,” he said. His voice sounded a bit off. He grabbed at the clipboard. He didn’t particularly care about what happened to old buildings, but he was certainly willing to do whatever it took to get this perky woman out of his miserable face so he could have a nice public cry in peace. His pen hovered just over the list of names on the petition when he noticed an address at the top of the sheet. The address seemed so familiar.
“Wait,” he said, tapping at the paper with the pen. “This is the old building off Brixton Road?”
“You know it?” The woman seemed overjoyed.
John, despite only ever having been to the place once, knew the building intimately. This was the location of his and Sherlock’s first case together, the one with the pink lady. John blinked at the clipboard, hardly believing his eyes. “Um,” he said. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve been there. Once.”
“It’s a lovely old building, isn’t it?” the girl asked.
“Well…” John wouldn’t exactly have called the place lovely. Decrepit might be a better descriptor. Condemnable might be another. From what he remembered of it, knocking the place to the ground might actually be the best course of action for the city. He scrawled out a signature on the petition anyway and handed the clipboard back to the woman. “You know there was a dead body found there, right?” he asked. “Three years ago?” Exactly three years ago, he thought. Three years ago nearly to the day.
“Oh,” the woman said. She tilted her head, thinking. “Well,” she said, “if we went and tore down every building in the city that had a dead body found in it, we wouldn’t have any buildings left, now would we?” With that, she was gone, off to bother other pedestrians with her clipboard and her cause.
“Yeah, John said to nobody in particular. “I suppose that’s true.”
“That’s where we had our first case together,” Sherlock said, reappearing beside him.
“Yeah,” John said. “I remember.” I remember all the time, John thought. I can’t stop remembering you.
Sherlock was looking at him out of the corner of his eye, lips lifted into a little smile.
“What?” John asked. “You want to go?”
“Could be fun,” Sherlock said.
“It’s an abandoned building,” John said. “And scheduled for demolition, apparently.”
“Like I said.” Sherlock grinned. “Fun.”
John chuckled, shaking his head.
“Besides,” Sherlock said. “I died right there.” He pointed across the street to the spot where the street-preacher was still waving his Bible and waiting for nothing. “A bit morbid to hang around here all afternoon, don’t you think?”
John studied the pavement and supposed that Sherlock—dead as he was—had a point. “Alright,” he said, easing himself off the bench. “Let’s go poke around a condemned building. Seems appropriate for the day, I suppose.” He started off down the pavement, looking for a cab.
Sherlock, of course, followed. He was smiling and nearly skipping, his hands buried in the pockets of his Belstaff. “How very romantic of you, John,” he said.
“Shut up,” said John.
But of course Sherlock never did.