Chapter Text
“I’m sorry, Mr Holmes, but Sebastian Moran was reporting missing two days ago,” the voice on the phone told him. Sherlock’s forehead creased, as he listened to the dial tone; he had encountered this again and again, trying to bring down Moriarty’s criminal web. He was not allowed out of the country on Mycroft’s orders; he was apparently still on ‘relapse watch’, and Mycroft utterly refused to let him go anywhere.
He was very alone without John.
The thought sent a hammer of hurt into his chest, making his mind and soul implode with pain. He had never been emotionally tied to another before John; John had been a colleague, a friend. Somebody Sherlock could envisage a long while with, living together, remaining together in some capacity.
Moriarty had caused John’s death, and his own, and left a wrecked remnant of a once-proud man to attend the funeral of the closest friend he had ever known.
He had tried to track down the web. Somebody, however, was beating him to it. Each lead he found was being broken down before he could get to it. This was the final straw; Moran had been Moriarty’s right-hand man, the last link in the chain, the final one to remove. And he was already gone.
Sherlock sat back, stunned. He didn’t know where else to go now. It was over. Moriarty’s web was finished, its strands separated and destroyed, or damaged at least. Everything that had made Moriarty the criminal mastermind he was, had gone.
He had gone to destroy everything for one reason – John. Everything had been for John, and now it was finished, and he hadn’t even done it himself. He had let John down more acutely than he had thought himself capable of. Pathetic, really. The greatest mind the world should have known, and he could not even avenge a friend adequately, without Big Brother invading.
Mycroft had never really considered that Sherlock was at risk of suicide. He wasn’t really the type, to be fair. The loss of a friend was hardly cause to lose himself, and Sherlock simply thought too much of himself to throw it away casually.
Mycroft thought he had gone to reminisce. How little he knew of his own baby brother.
Sherlock stood on the edge of the roof, gazing at the pavement. John had shot himself on the roof, next to Moriarty’s body; he wanted to die here too, let himself fall, let himself die where John did. Such ridiculous sentimentality. Caring. He was better than this, he knew that, but he was damned if he could remember why.
“Sherlock?”
The voice was familiar. So familiar, like the one you dream of, the voice that lingers in your consciousness somewhere between sleep and awake, real but intangible. John. His John. The memories and immediacy of John Watson, Doctor John Watson, who had changed his life and taught him that life was not quite so obvious, or as mundane, as he had imagined. The man with whom he was never bored.
“John,” he murmured, as his vision started to swim. Confident hands held his shoulders, and Sherlock gasped slightly, knees buckling from beneath. “John,” he repeated. A face swam in front of him, and Sherlock reached for it with just a flicker of desperation, and passed out.