He never got over it. He never left Baker Street. And when a woman named Mary asked him for his number in a quiet pub, he smiled and declined with the consummate grace that marked every interaction between John Watson and the rest of humanity.
On the way home from that meeting, he reminisced - as he so often did - about the one who’d fallen. For two perfect years, perhaps his greatest asset to the world’s only consulting detective had been John’s ability to intervene between Sherlock and the world he inhabited, full of those irritating, distracting, dull creatures known as other people.
Two years. John looked up at the night sky, and sighed, thinking about planets and stars and going around the garden like a teddy bear. He’d spent three years after Sherlock jumped waiting for the man to return; had spent that fourth year sodding drunk. Pathetic, just a bit. Took him three damn years to finally admit that the man was never coming home. Took most of that fourth for him to be able to say the words out loud.
I loved you. I loved you. I loved you.
He’d mourned Sherlock longer than he’d known the bloody prat, and if that wasn’t the mark of a soulmate, of the kind of friendship and love that lasts your whole life, he didn’t know what else could be.
It was a bit of hell, really, to live that life alone when the person you were supposed to spend it with was gone. But John managed; he always did, always had. John Watson could survive damn near anything. He stayed in their flat. He started talking to his old friends again. He found better work as a doctor, and he settled into his long wait, his long quiet patience set to this one task. His life was full, and good. He walked around with a Sherlock-shaped hole in his chest, and everyone he met knew it, but the edges knit together over time.
Those next two decades, he smiled. He laughed. He fed ducks in the park. He had tea with Mrs. Hudson. He forgave Lestrade, and Sally, and even Mycroft, though the last one took a good nine years to take.
Even, eventually, he forgave himself. Sherlock would have hated the sentimentality of it all, John was sure; he could hear the eviscerating commentary any time he cared to.
Which was often. John almost always wore a little half-smile as he faded into the background of others’ social interactions, thinking to himself of what Sherlock would say. Hearing a rich, deep voice that only existed in his mind and holding back his smile at the cutting remarks, the brilliant deductions, the wry comments. He talked to Sherlock in his head frequently – not constantly, not quite, but at least once a day. Sometimes just with a nod of acknowledgement as he went to bed, and sometimes a whole day spent talking to his mad genius and feeling soothed at the remembered/imagined voice speaking back to him.
It wasn’t a bad life, not at all.
It ended when John was sixty-four. Routine, normal, a heart attack, such an ordinary and dull method of passing on. Sherlock would have been immensely displeased at John having the temerity to die so boringly.
That was his last thought before he blinked, and knew – knew in bones he didn’t have any more, knew in his soul because that’s all he had left – that he was dead.
He was dead, and standing at a door, and in front of him was Sherlock.
John smiled, a particular fond, loving smile the world hadn’t seen from him in two and a half decades. “You waited.”
Sherlock’s nose wrinkled a little – obvious – but his eyes were soft, and his mouth shaped, “Of course.” The voice had never been quite perfect, quite right in his head, but it was vibrant now. Here. Real. Velvet undertones and night itself given voice, and part of John eased back into place that hadn’t been whole since before that last phone call. This, then, was peace.
John tilted his head, asking Ready? just like Sherlock had asked it of him, one night in a pool a long time ago. Sherlock’s smile recalled the gesture, and as John had then, he gave a short, sharp nod of acknowledgement. When you are.
John opened the door, and they passed into the light together.
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