Chapter Text
3:07 AM, Friday 11th April 2014
“Lidocaine, two percent, and I need pressure on that right wrist now!”
John Watson doesn’t look up as he barks the order. His hands are steady, gloves already red to the wrists. The blood is thin and slick, diluted with water and something else. Probably zolpidem, maybe diazepam. He doesn’t know yet. Doesn’t matter. She’s still breathing.
Barely.
They’re rushing the stretcher through the halls like it’s on fire, two paramedics running alongside as the girl’s limp body jerks slightly with each jolt of the wheels. She’s drenched, soaked through with bathwater mixed with blood.
“Prep Bay Three!” John barks at his staff. “I need more pressure, Adams! Oxygen, two litres. Type and cross, and start a tox screen for zopiclone, paracetamol, anything they found at the scene. Do we need a stomach pump?” he asks the paramedics.
“She threw up in the ambulance.”
“Good.” His voice is cold. Detached. “Might’ve saved her own life.”
They swing through the double doors into the bay, curtains flung open, the trauma team assembling like clockwork. The paramedics guide the gurney into position, lock it beside the monitors, and step back. They’re sweating and breathless, but their job is done.
“Her housemate found her in the tub, passed out already,” one says, backing away. “We haven't been able to rouse her yet.”
John nods once, curt. “We’ve got it. Thanks.”
The paramedics incline their heads and silently vanish through the doors. John is glad to see them go.
There’s a waxy pallor to the girl, the kind that makes John’s stomach twist despite years of practice. He’s seen corpses with more warmth. Her skin is pale, almost grey. Her lips are tinged blue around the edges. He can smell the bathwater on her, powdery with lavender and something vaguely antiseptic, like cheap soap or supermarket bubble bath.
“Heart rate’s dropping,” the nurse beside him says, watching the monitor.
“Saline wide open,” John snaps. “Push a gram of tranexamic acid. We’re not losing her.”
He’s at the girl’s left arm, working fast. Clamping, clearing, suturing. The fresh blood is dark and sluggish, seeping between the bandages they’re swapping in and out with practiced precision.
The team moves around him, quiet and practiced, without panic.
The A&E is always chaotic, but to the staff who have dedicated their lives to it, it’s all rhythm and instinct. It’s exactly what John needs. It’s what he lives for now. The hours between dusk and dawn when no one expects him to be anything other than a man with blood on his hands.
The girl’s name is Emily. Nineteen. First-year student at King’s College. Studying literature. Her housemate told the ambulance crew she’d been quiet lately. Sleeping too much. Not eating. The usual story.
It’s not John’s job to ask why. It’s his job to make sure they survive long enough to ask it of themselves.
He quickly shifts to the other wrist, which is worse. Deeper. He can see the muscle exposed, white and wet. The blade must’ve been sharp. A razor or box cutter, not a kitchen knife. Precise, premeditated.
The familiar feeling the sight invokes turns his stomach.
“BP’s stabilising,” one of the nurses murmurs.
John nods, allowing himself a moment to look at the girl’s face again.
She’s so young. Freckles across her nose. Eyelashes still damp. Her lips are moving slightly now, unconscious murmuring, like she’s trying to explain herself. Or apologise. Or maybe ask for someone.
A sudden wave of nausea crashes through John.
He swallows it down.
The girl is still breathing.
She has a chance. He didn’t.
Except—
John knows that’s not quite true, doesn’t he?
He doesn’t allow himself to finish the thought.
“Page psych,” he says instead. “And someone call up to surgical. She’ll need vascular and potentially plastics once we’re finished here.”
Someone sets the saline bag in the cradle beside him, the drip already flowing. The girl stirs slightly again. Her fingers twitch. Her eyes flutter under her closed lids. John nods, encouraged.
“You want a break?” The nurse beside him, Linda, asks gently. “You’ve been on your feet for ten straight hours.”
“I’m fine,” John replies without looking up.
“You’ve been ‘fine’ since you started here last year,” she argues. “I didn't buy it then either.”
John ignores her. Pressure. Clamp. Suture. His body knows the motions even when the rest of him feels like it’s running on fumes. He leans into it like the habit it’s become, like the rhythm of stitching flesh back together might keep something inside him from falling apart too.
There’s something almost sacred about it, repairing what someone else tried to destroy. What they thought they had the right to end.
What he had once stood under and begged to stop.
He gives one last tug of the suture, tight and clean. No wasted thread. No wasted words.
Once he’s satisfied they’ve done all they can, he finally steps back, exhaling through his nose.
“Get her to surgical,” he says quietly, but it’s an order all the same.
Linda nods and moves fast. The team converges around the gurney with a coordinated efficiency that John both appreciates and distances himself from. He doesn’t join them. Doesn’t help push. Just stands back, hands hanging limp at his sides, watching as Emily is wheeled out of the trauma bay and disappears through the swinging doors.
He doesn’t move right away.
The adrenaline slowly fades. His heart calms in his chest. He scowls at the feeling.
He eyes the spot where the stretcher had been, the abandoned bandages stained red and the air still faintly sweet with lavender and blood. The echo of the girl’s pulse, faint and fluttering, seems to linger in the room even after she’s gone.
Only then does John turn and make his way to the nearest sink.
He peels off his gloves and drops them in the bin. The tap hisses to life, and he scrubs at his hands like he’s trying to erase more than blood, fingers working until the skin is pink and raw. The hospital soap stings like hell, especially across the scrapes on his knuckles from where he’d punched a supply cabinet last night.
That one had been an overdose.
Seventeen years old. Accidental. Cocaine. First time trying it, probably.
They’d gotten him back for all of a minute before his heart stopped again. John had been doing compressions when the boy slipped away. Had felt ribs give beneath his hands.
John hadn’t saved him. Not that one.
He shuts off the water and stares down at the sink, chest rising and falling with deep, practiced breaths.
Then he dries his hands, checks the board, and heads back into the hall.
Still fine.
Just like always.
It’s all fine.
*
Two hours later, John Watson MD finds himself wandering through the lightening streets of London with one hand around the neck of a liquor bottle and no destination in mind.
The typical English rain has let up, mostly, giving way to a fine mist hanging in the air. It catches in John’s hair, soaking into the hem of his jumper. He should’ve gone home. Should’ve changed. Should’ve slept. He’s got another shift tonight, and Linda will give him hell if he shows up grey-faced and twitching again.
But the thought of closing his eyes makes his chest seize up. The nightmares always start quick. No warm-up. No gentle slope. He closes his eyes, drifts off, and there he is again. Kneeling in blood. Reaching too late. Calling a name that doesn’t answer anymore.
Most nights, he almost misses the dreams full of sunburnt skies, grit in his teeth and the dull bloom of a bullet tearing through muscle. In comparison, they were far easier to accept. At least those made sense. At least those belonged to him.
These new ones don’t. These ones wear a long coat and fall from impossible heights.
He hadn’t meant to leave the hospital. Not really. Linda had taken one look at his shaking hands, the way they only did when adrenaline finally crashed out and was exchanged with unignorable exhaustion, and set her jaw like she was prepping for surgery.
“You’re done,” she’d said. “Off the clock, Watson. Go. Before I call security to walk you out.”
He hadn’t argued, just sighed and stared towards the door until his body moved on its own.
Now he doesn’t know where he’s going. Only where he won’t.
Not home. Not there. Not the silent, dark little flat with its undrunk tea and its ghost-dense corners. Not the place he had torn apart and rebuilt piece by piece, drywall and floorboards and cracked old tile, trying to hammer the grief out of his bones. Not the rooms that still smell faintly of plaster and paint, even now, almost a year later. Not the small, neat bedroom with a still-packed duffel in the closet, half-zipped, as if waiting for him to finally snap at a moment's notice and run.
But everywhere in London feels like Sherlock anyway. The sharp curve of a particular curb; the gleam of wet cobblestone under streetlights; the echo of laughter down an alley where once they’d chased a suspect. Even the smell of rain on brick feels like a memory.
He tells himself not to think of him.
His mind disobeys, like it always does.
Because what if he’d said something different on the phone that day? What if he’d begged harder, or listened better, or just known, somehow, what to say to make him stay?
He tips the bottle back and grimaces at the taste. Cheap. Harsh. It does the job.
The streets bleed past. Neon reflections stutter across puddles. Somewhere, a siren wails. Somewhere, a man shouts something into the quickly fading night. John keeps walking.
He doesn’t realise where his feet are taking him until the city’s glow fades behind iron gates and twisted trees.
The graveyard is empty. Of course it is. It’s 5am and the world is still holding its breath.
John moves between the rows of stone like he’s sleepwalking. The boots on his feet have made this pilgrimage so many times they don’t need guidance anymore.
Sherlock’s grave isn’t ostentatious. No statue, no inscription. Just his name.
If it had been up to John, he might’ve added something else. A phrase. A fact. The truth. It hadn’t been up to John.
He stops in front of the headstone and stands for a long time, bottle hanging from one hand, half-empty now. The mist clings to him like mourning cloth, damp and heavy on his shoulders.
He takes a swig, winces.
“I stitched up a girl tonight,” he says finally, voice hoarse. “Nineteen. Tried to open both wrists in the bath. Took every pill in the house.” He gives a small, bitter laugh. “She lived. I think. She might, anyway. I did what I could.”
Silence.
John shifts his weight, boots creaking on damp gravel. He doesn’t look at the headstone. Not directly.
“There was a kid last night too,” he continues. “Seventeen. OD. Cocaine. One bad dose and he just—” He makes a sharp motion with one hand, slicing the air. “Got him back for a minute. Long enough to feel him die under my hands a second time.”
He drinks again. A longer pull. The bottle’s almost gone.
“I tried. I swear I tried.” He adds. His voice cracks, just a little. “I don’t know if that matters. I don’t know if anything fucking matters anymore.”
Wind brushes the trees. The leaves whisper.
He listens.
Not for an answer. He knows better, but something in him still hopes in spite of himself. Something still aches.
He wipes a hand over his mouth and exhales shakily, forcing a laugh that sounds more like a cough.
“Linda said my hands were shaking,” he mutters. “Not a good sign for a trauma surgeon, is it? It's just— I didn’t want to stop. Didn’t want to—”
He trails off.
What was it he didn’t want to do?
Think. Remember. Breathe. Sleep.
Live without him.
“She told me to sleep.” John continues. A hollow laugh escapes. “Sleep. Right.”
Another swig. Just enough left for one more mouthful.
John lowers himself slowly to sit at the foot of the grave. The bottle settles beside his boot. His head drops forward into his hands.
“I should’ve said something else,” he murmurs. “On the phone. I don’t know what, but… something.”
A pause.
“I’m sorry.”
The words drop like stones in the quiet.
John sits there for a while, breathing unevenly, the cold earth soaking into his trousers and the mist curling into his collar. He doesn’t move, doesn’t cry, just breathes and listens to the nothing.
Minutes pass. Maybe longer. The bottle glints faintly by his boot, catching the grey, watery light of pre-dawn.
He presses his palms into his eyes, hard enough to spark bursts of colour behind his lids.
The images don’t go away. They never do.
The phone call. The way Sherlock’s voice had sounded. Not broken, not panicked, just… off. Hollowed out like someone had scooped the life right out of him.
The roof. The fucking roof.
The blood.
John clenches his jaw. His teeth ache from the tension. He knows he shouldn’t. He knows it’s useless. Knows Sherlock’s dead and gone and can’t hear a goddamn word.
Something rises anyway. Bitter. Burning. Bigger than him.
“Jesus,” he mutters. “What the hell were you thinking?”
The anger creeps in like a tide, slow but inexorable.
He wraps his arms around his knees and stares at the headstone, the name carved clean and clinical, and his voice lifts, sharper now.
“You didn’t even say goodbye. You gave me a riddle. A bloody riddle and a phone call.”
He swallows hard. The ache in his throat is thick and clawing.
“I thought we—” His voice cracks. “I thought we were in this together. You and me, yeah? That was the deal. That was always the deal.”
He stands suddenly, too fast, swaying just a bit before catching himself. The blood in his veins feels too hot, the liquor rushing to his head.
“You didn’t even try,” he says, louder now, fists clenched. “You didn’t let me try. You didn’t let me help. You just— you left.”
His breath comes faster. His chest heaves with it. He looks down at the grave like he’s daring it to answer back.
“You knew I’d never be okay after that, didn’t you?” he snaps. “You knew what it would do to me, because you always know, and you did it anyway.”
He turns away and then back again, pacing like a man caged. The fury pulses inside him, bright and wild and terrifying.
“I don’t understand, Sherlock,” he growls. “I still don’t fucking understand.”
The words hang, jagged and raw.
Beneath them guilt curls in his gut like rot.
Because Sherlock jumped, which means something in him had to be broken beyond repair. Something had to be wrong, so wrong, and John hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t stopped it. Hadn’t known the words to say to make him stay.
“I should’ve known,” John whispers. His knees give out again, and he sinks back down, slower this time, almost folding in on himself. “I should’ve known. I should’ve said something else. Done something else. I still don’t know what, but—”
His hands tremble as they press against his face again. The guilt is acid now. It burns.
“I’m angry,” he says aloud, as if confessing it could cleanse it. “I’m angry, and I don’t want to be. You don’t get to be angry at someone who’s… gone.”
He chokes on the word.
“But I am. I’m angry all the time. At you. At me. At everything.”
He lowers his voice, hoarse again, almost a whisper now.
“I was always angry. You knew that, but now it’s worse. It’s all I have left.”
He presses a hand flat against the cold stone, fingers spread.
“I wanted to fix it,” he says. “We could’ve fixed it. Together. We always did. That’s what we did.”
A breath shudders out of him, sharp and broken.
“But you didn’t even give me the chance to try.”
The stone is cold under his palm.
John sits there in the damp, in the mist, in the silence, until it all starts to pulse again beneath his skin. The anger doesn’t vanish. It coils tighter.
“I mean, fuck you,” he mutters suddenly, biting the words through clenched teeth. “Fuck you, Shrerlock, for doing this to me. To Mrs. Hudson. To yourself.”
His fingers curl into fists.
“You always had to be the clever one. Had to be smarter, didn’t you? Always three steps ahead. Well—” He swipes at his eyes, even though they’re dry. “—look where that got us.”
He grabs the bottle, tips back what’s left. It burns satisfyingly going down.
Then, as if pulled by the tide of something ancient and volcanic, he slams the empty bottle to the ground beside him and punches the earth with his bare fist.
A sharp jolt of pain travels up his arm. Skin splits at his already abused knuckles.
John stays there for a moment, breathing hard, forehead pressed to the stone, fist in the cold grass. His heart won’t stop hammering.
Then he feels it.
The unmistakable shift in the air. The prickle of being watched. He turns slowly, instinct flaring to life.
There’s a man standing several paces behind him. Nondescript suit. Eyes beady and uninterested. Face like a statue carved to be easily forgotten. He stands motionless, patient. Waiting.
John exhales through his nose.
Of course.
Of fucking course.
He pushes himself upright, knuckles throbbing, coat hanging heavy off his shoulders.
The man doesn’t speak. Just watches.
“Right,” John mutters. “Fine.”
No instructions. No need. He knows the routine by now.
He follows the silent man through the maze of gravestones, his boots squelching slightly in the wet grass. Past trees dripping fog, through the black iron gates. A sleek, black car waits at the curb, window down just enough to let out the smell of expensive leather and cheap liquor.
John doesn’t ask questions. He slides into the backseat.
The man shuts the door behind him and takes the wheel silently.
They drive.
London rolls past outside the window, a slow, grey blur. John doesn’t look at it. His head leans back against the seat. He closes his eyes. Tries to ignore the headache blooming behind them.
They don’t stop until Baker Street appears behind the windows.
The car idles. The man waits.
John opens the door and steps out. His legs wobble just a bit on the steps. He steadies himself with one hand against the brick façade and uplocks the front door.
He doesn’t look at 221B.
Instead, he turns, walks slowly to the lower door, and unlocks it too.
Down the narrow steps. Into the little flat below.
221C.
The deafening silence rushes in.