Chapter Text
It had been three years since John Watson had last seen that dickhead. No, not just any dickhead. Sherlock Holmes, his best friend. And these three years were going on four. The army doctor had said: “one more miracle” and that miracle was seeming less likely to happen every passing minute.
He had tried moving out of the flat, but every time he put something else into the box, he felt pained, like he was giving up on something. Dr Watson never gave up, so he decided to stop moving out and stick it out for the miracle.
Smiling had become a rare thing for John. Nothing much made him happy anymore. Even the occasional call from Lestrade or the patients at the hospital didn't seem to help at all. He would go to either the pub with the Detective Inspector or to surgery, and nothing would help him get over what had happened those three, almost four, years ago. His friend wasn’t the only thing that had died. John Watson’s crutch had as well.
He took the occasional walk, still wrote, but not in a blog. He didn’t want the whole world to see what he was thinking. He wanted privacy again, so he wrote in simple journals, the ones that didn’t even cost a pound. He wrote in the journal every night. It was one simple sentence: “Come home.” After every journal was filled, he would burn the paper book, trying to get rid of what he wrote. His eyes burned with the tears, but he blamed them on the smoke from the fire. Every book that he lit up lifted a weight from his chest, and, even though he cried (it was the smoke, honestly), he couldn’t stop writing in the journals. He enjoyed how he could write hard, soft, or scribble. He felt his emotion leave with every pen stroke, and he could see his feelings in the writing.
He longed to delete his blog, but he didn’t. He didn’t even lock it, make it private. He wasn’t honestly that intune with technology, and he felt that, in case his miracle did happen, he wouldn’t be able to figure out how to fix what he did to the blog. He barely knew how to delete a post. He barely knew how to work his phone!
So when his text tone went off, a simple blip, he looked at it over on the kitchen table, a bit confused. No one texted him except Mycroft, and he had stopped that over a year and a half ago. Lestrade called him: “Easier if I’m on the drive.” John had to move his laptop to go get it. It was a bit more effort than he would have liked, but he made himself get up.
Open the door. I’ve been out here for five minutes, knocking.
He frowned at the text, confused. He hadn’t heard any knocking, and he wasn’t about to go check. It may just be a prank, as he didn’t recognise the number. He closed his phone and went back to his chair. His phone’s time read 22:00 anyway, so he went to turn in.
He woke up with a start and found himself listening in on the darkness. Listening to silence. He missed hearing the melancholy violin at the odd hours of the night, missed the odd smells from his friend’s experiments. Sliding out of his covers, John flinched as his feet touched the cold wooden floor. He listened harder, not sure what he was so intent on hearing until the scraping from downstairs came more intently to his attention. The floor creaked as he got up, and the noise downstairs suddenly stopped. John froze in his place, waiting until he heard the noise again, then slid his feet towards the door, not even bothering with socks. He shuffled out into the hall, passing the closed door. He promised himself he would never walk into that room, no matter how rarely it was used when its owner was alive. He stopped at the top of the stairs and listened again. He heard soft whispers with no replies, the scraping again, and a pause.
John waited until the whispers started again before he slowly made his way downstairs. Third, seventh and final stair creaks... He reached the bottom and paused as there was silence again.
“I know, John, I know...”
He froze as the whispers were a bit louder. He recognised that voice. Was he sleeping?
“John, you would kill me if you knew I was here.”
He heard the scraping again.
“You haven’t taken care of my violin. The strings need to be changed, wood polished...”
The soldier moved to the wall and peered around the doorway, seeing the back of a dark coat. Sherlock...?
The man moved and put the violin back in the case. “John, I’m sorry,” he whispered, “I wish I could come back.” He put the violin back up into the bookcase’s top shelf, the shelf that John could never reach.
As the dark figure turned around, John hid back behind the wall. His breaths came quick and quiet as he listened to the man walk towards the doorway. Fuck. Watson, you are an idiot! It shouldn’t matter. This is all a dream, just a dream. Sherlock can’t be alive. He fell from the top of a building. You saw him hit the ground, you felt his pulse. The man cannot be alive. But, as the stranger walked over the threshold, all of his hesitations and excuses fell away as he saw the man’s face. “Sherlock?!”
The man froze and looked at him, eyes wide as he scanned the soldier’s exhausted body. “No, John, it’s not me. You’re only sleeping.”
“Sleeping, my ass!” His fist connected with the man’s firm stomach before his other fist hit him in the chin.
If I had to punch that face, I'd avoid the nose and teeth too.
John grit his teeth and punched the man in the nose. “You are the nation’s largest asshole that I know! What were you thinking, leaving me for four years!”
“Three years and seven months, John...” he muttered from behind his hand that held his streaming nose.
“Doesn’t fucking matter, Sherlock! Where the fuck were you?! Why did you leave me for so long?!”
“John... I told you that I left my note. Didn’t you...?”
“I heard you, Sherlock! You left your note with me via phone call!”
The detective frowned, removing his hand from his bloodied nose. “No, John... My note was my cell phone. I left it on top of Bart’s.”
“...The police took it in for evidence.” John wiped his bloody hand on his shirt. “Why was your note in your phone?”
“John!” Sherlock started pacing, ignoring the blood on his lip. “At least Lestrade went through it, right?”
“I’m not sure.”
The detective spun on his heel and strutted towards John. “Not sure? We have to go then!”
“Go? Go where?” John yelped as Sherlock grabbed his hand to drag him outside.
“Go talk to Lestrade! There’s something important on my phone!”
“Important?” John tried to shake Sherlock’s hand out of his. “What’s so important? Let me change, then!”
“John!” Sherlock’s hand slipped from his as the doctor went upstairs.