Archive of Our Own ^beta

He wishes Sherlock would be sitting there. Wishes things could be the way they used to be.

Three days. Seventy two hours, forty eight minutes, and thirty six seconds ago, his best friend committed suicide. His timing shouldn’t be that precise. This scares him. 

The gun is pressed to his head, third time in three days. Simple revolver. Simple death. The pull of a trigger, and he’s with Sherlock. 

He took his pulse. 

Three days ago, he took Sherlock’s pulse. 

Thing is, he didn’t have one. 

His skin was still warm. 

Fuck. 

The nightmares started eight hours after Sherlock’s lanky body hits the ground. 

They haven’t stopped. 

In the seventy two hours, forty nine minutes, and thirty six seconds that he’s gone on living while Sherlock Holmes was dead, he’s gotten about fifteen minutes of sleep. 

Tea.  He’s tried drinking it to keep himself awake. 

There’s no one to drink it with. 

Tea can’t wake him up from this hell. 

Nothing can. 

The gun is pressed to his head, third time in three days. 

Only he knows how much he wants to pull the trigger. 

He really wants to pull the trigger. 

I loved him.

He still loves him.

It hurts more now. 

It’s always hurt. Sherlock was married to his work. 

Now he’s married to the dirt that’s piled six feet on top of him. 

Lestrade has stopped by once a day. John doesn’t talk. He doesn’t need to. He knows that the Detective Inspector is there to see if he’s still alive. Talking doesn’t need to happen. 

It doesn’t matter if it needs to happen, anyways. It won’t. 

People like him—people who believed Moriarty were the reason for Sherlock being dead. 

Dead… Gone…  

He’s alone. Alone and so fucking lonely. 

Alone doesn’t protect you. It makes things worse. 

Sherlock was wrong. About this one thing, he was dead, dead wrong. 

He closes his eyes and is about to pull the trigger. Third time’s a charm, right—

He hears a shuffle of feet in the doorway. The small sound scares him so damn much he almost accidentally blows his brain to bits. Fumbling with the gun, he points it at the door. He’d been in such a state he didn’t notice that the person there had gotten in. 

Wait. He locked the door. He locked the door because three days was three days too many and he was done. Whoever is standing there picked the lock. 

He hopes to fuck its Sherlock. He cocks the gun anyways, in case it isn’t. He opens his eyes. 

Sebastian Moran is standing in the doorway, looking more than a bit confused. 

“The fuck are you doing here?” he spat out, and Sebastian looks at the gun warily. They both know that John won’t shoot. He wouldn’t dare. 

“I’m supposed to kill you,” he said, doing a rather impressive job of keeping his voice cold and not confused like his face. 

“Well, Sherlock’s dead and gone, so you can fuck right off, Moran,” he hissed, and lowered the gun. Finally, he surveyed the man. 

Looked the same as when he had seen him the night at the pool. Not really. Hair was a bit more messed up, dark circles had formed under his eyes, sniper stance was just a bit more hunched. His eyes were empty. Hollow. Not really seeing. 

He had loved Jim. 

Well, wasn’t that the fucking discovery of the century. They were the same man. John had lost a sociopath and Sebastian had lost a psychopath. The irony makes him have to fight off the urge to kill the both of them. 

“My boss is gone, too. Just following orders, Watson. You should know about those, coming from the army,” he states, and since his gun is lowered he leans against the frame of the door casually. 

“Your boss is dead. His orders don’t matter.” 

“You helped kill him.” 

“How in the fuck did I do that?” 

“Being friends with Sherlock. Jumped to save you. Moriarty gave me orders to shoot you if he didn’t die.” 

John feels as though he’s been gutted with a spoon. 

“So then he shot himself, because Sherlock would have figured out the code to call us off,” Sebastian snarled, and walked in the living room. For the slightest of seconds, John thinks the sniper will walk up to him and snap his neck. 

No such luck. 

The bastard sits in the chair in front of him. Sherlock’s chair. It’s like he fucking knows. 

He’s too calm. Too stoic. John needs to evoke some emotion out of him. 

They fucked like rabbits. Didn’t take much for John to figure it out. Jim’s lips got too close to John’s ear that night at the pool and lo and behold the little red target the rifle emitted went to Jim’s chest. That action didn’t make someone happy at all. Jim did it on purpose. 

A bastard, in love with another bastard. Figures. 

“You shouldn’t give your fuck buddy – slash – boss so much credit, Moran. The guy liked to make an entrance. Figures he’d make an explosive exit as well.” 

Sebastian tenses in his chair. “Shut the fuck up, Watson,” he spits, fingers gripping the fabric on the arms of the chair entirely too hard, so hard his knuckles are turning white. 

Bingo. 

“Do you wank to pictures of him?” he asks innocently, ignoring the last comment. “Oh, that’s right. There probably are no pictures of him. Ooh, maybe there are. On the newspaper he was in. Is that what you do, Moran? Copy off the newspaper a few times each week so you can give yourself a shitty hand job and come on his picture? He’d be so fucking proud of you. Of his bitch, his whore, who even in death still can’t get come to drip out of his dick unless he’s there,” he says with a sick kind of malice, a malice that makes his mouth turn upward in a devilish smirk. 

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Sebastian roars, and shoots up from the chair, pointing the handgun he had out right at John’s head. The barrel is almost as close to his head as when he was holding his own gun there. 

“No need to hold a gun to my head, Moran,” he says, voice now weary. “I can do that just fine by myself. Although, if you’d like, you can shoot me, save me the blood on my hands. They're covered in the red shit already,” he says, and thinks of the red thumbprint he left on Sherlock’s pulse point. 

Sebastian’s face seems to almost contort. Maybe because the fact that they’re so fucking alike. Definitely not in sympathy. 

“Well,” John sighs after a few minutes, and gets up from the couch. “If you’re not going to shoot me, then you’re of no use to either me or your dead boss. I’m going upstairs. Get out of my flat, and lock the door on the way out. Figures you should do that, seeing as how it was locked when you let yourself in, and the fact that you’re unwanted company.” 

He walks to his room, not giving a single fuck about the sniper standing behind him. All he knows is that he goes into his room. As he closes the door, the fact that Sebastian still didn’t put him out of his misery overwhelms him. He stands close to the door, hearing footsteps go down the stairs. The door to the front of the flat shuts, and he hears the snicker of a lock after. He’s always had good hearing. 

He collapses on the floor. Why didn’t the bastard put him out of his misery? Why, why, why? 

He curls into a ball and lets out howling sobs, the tears not stopping for a good hour and a half. 

It’s now been seventy four hours, fifteen minutes, and twenty three seconds since Sherlock’s died. 

He should have been dead seventy two hours, fourteen minutes, and twenty three seconds ago. 

He’s nothing without Sherlock. He never will be. 

And he'll always count how long it's been since he's lost the will to live. 

He's the walking dead.

He doesn’t uncurl from his fetal position for three more hours, and then lies on the bed. He takes a piss when he needs to. 

John doesn’t come out of room until forty eight hours later. 

It’s been one hundred and twenty two hours, thirty two minutes, and nineteen seconds since Sherlock’s died.