Chapter Text
John didn’t hear the dog barking outside the window, or the new plastic kitchen clock ticking without its usual click, like something made for a child’s room. The coffee had long gone cold. He stared at the brown ring in the cup as if it were proof that something had been here and was gone.
Sherlock had vanished from life not only physically, but also after two years, even sounds and scents no longer belonged to him.
He could have rung Mycroft and asked why the scalpel was gone from the windowsill. Or why the kitchen now held no knives. Or where most of the pills had disappeared. But John already knew.
“Bastard,” he breathed. His own voice sounded hoarse, alien.
The food sat untouched. It felt … inappropriate. Like drinking champagne in a cemetery. Every sip would be a betrayal.
“Therapy helps. I’m much better now,” he had told the therapist.
A lie.
She nodded, wearing that restrained concern that turned his insides out. She’d suggested he start writing again. He’d snorted that it was nonsense; the one person whose opinion mattered no longer read anything.
Moving as though through water, John walked into the sitting-room, feeling the weight of his own heavy body. When had he last slept properly? Before the anniversary? Before the funeral? Or even earlier, in some other, previous London where Sherlock still had hands, eyes, a voice?
Yet he approached the table and opened the laptop. The screen glowed a dull hospital grey. A blank document. The cursor blinked. John sat and placed his hands on the keyboard.
All right. Write, then.
He began to remember: the evening, the call, the stairs, Barts. Strange hands gripping his shoulders. The cursed roof. Sherlock’s voice on the phone. The roaring in his ears. The impossibility of believing.
He wanted to pour it all out, scrape it from himself, force words to rebuild even a fragment of the catastrophe.
He sat with his fingers on the keys for what felt like hours, thoughts thick, saturated, broken. He imagined he was writing—line after line of confession: how hard it was to breathe, how unbearable to eat, how the place where life had once been ached. Then he looked at the screen.
Why?
How?
For what?
Nothing else. Not a single paragraph. Not a single sentence. He blinked, clicked the mouse, read the words again, and sagged back in the chair, exhausted. He had tried to go on living with only those three questions in his head, but it could not continue.
Watson had been given mandatory leave after working himself into collapse on hospital shifts. Paperwork signed, medical certificate attached. Diagnosis: emotional exhaustion. Reality: death. He was little more than a body without soul or heart. A new nurse hovered, always trying to spark something, inviting him out. Mary had no idea he had no intention of returning to the clinic. He had given himself a deadline to sort everything out…a conditional sentence.
He rose and made his way unhurriedly to the bedroom. A floorboard creaked as he climbed the stairs. He opened the wardrobe but didn’t rummage. Instead, he knelt, pushed aside a shoe-box. Beneath it lay an old board. He caught its edge with a fingernail; it lifted.
The space was hollow. The box sat dusty, steeped in wood and time. Inside, something heavy waited under rough cloth. Caution. Or a premonition.
John drew out the revolver. His hands did not tremble.
He sat on the floor, leaned against the wall, exhaled, pressed the barrel to his temple, and pulled the trigger. Nothing. Click. The cylinder swung open. He gently, almost apologetically, ran a finger over the metal. One bullet. Seven chambers. Seven days.
John didn’t know where to begin, so he started with trivialities like checking the weather that day. He pulled CCTV logs, newspapers, and Lestrade’s interview in print. Enlarged a photo of the building, and called up a map on the screen. The worst day of his life shrank to a brief sequence: the call. The roof. Sherlock. And then—silence. It all felt like shadow-play; images existed, but meaning refused to form.
But Watson had to do something.
He created a folder named Barts, then changed his mind: SH-01.
Then scrolled through everything he’d gathered that evening: a handful of screenshots, a photo of the roof, a list of cameras, the call log, hurried notes—“not consistent,” “who saw the body first?” “Where’s his phone?”
He clicked through the files with mechanical precision, as if that would change anything. No. Still no pattern, no logic, no leverage.
The screen was too narrow.
John slung a warm cardigan over his shoulders and left the flat without turning on the overhead light. He padded down the stairs barefoot and stopped at the storeroom door.
“John?” Mrs Hudson called.
He turned. She stood in her dressing gown, with a cup in hand.
“Just need something.” He said briefly.
“Are you all right?” Her voice was soft, laced with worry that made his insides shrink.
“Yes. I just can’t sleep.”
She didn’t press. Simply nodded and disappeared into her flat. He stepped into the cupboard. Dust, wood, an old coat stand, and boxes. In the corner, leaning against the wall, stood a white noticeboard; paint had flaked off one leg. John lugged it upstairs, careful not to clatter.
He set it beside his chair, found a pack of markers in the drawer under the television, and shook the black, still wet.
With a trembling hand, he made the first stroke. In the upper left corner, neatly yet forcefully, he wrote:
WHY?
Below it:
HOW?
And then:
FOR WHAT?
Stepped back. For now, there was nothing else, only those three words, mirroring his pain.
John didn’t allow himself the luxury of second thoughts the next morning.
He rose, dressed, and walked. Fog chewed at the lamplight along the streets. With each step the fine rain soaked the wool of his coat, slid under his collar, and lodged in his throat. The cough it drew was half weakness and half protest. He did not slow.
That was how John found himself on Grayson Street, before a townhouse with a brass plaque that read on a pristine white ground:
Dr Charles Abernathy
Psychiatrist – Analytical Practice
The reception greeted him with that strange, unnaturally warm hush: no music, no clink of china, no rustle of papers, only shaded lamps and a young woman at the desk.
“Good morning, Dr Watson. Dr Abernathy is expecting you,” she said without rising.
He crossed a carpet that swallowed footsteps and reached a door already ajar. At that very moment, a voice drifted out, precise, British, and intentionally gentle:
“Please come in, Dr Watson.”
This was wealth staged as taste, an aristocrat’s library misplaced in time. The ceiling soared, heavy with baroque plasterwork that bordered on mockery. Curtains in near-black burgundy drank the light. The carpet was claret and thick, patterned with patient detail. Books rose in ranks from skirting to cornice, no plastic in sight, sorted by colour and shade and height, maybe even by philosophical gloom. Nothing out of place. Nothing unpolished. Air without dust.
John’s gaze lingered on the perfectly aligned spines, and in his head, Sherlock’s voice echoed:
“Obsessive-compulsive fits. Otherwise? Narcissism, with a ribbon.”
He didn’t smile, but his lips twitched. Then he looked at the leather patient’s chair, positioned at just such an angle that one felt both observed and protected. Sherlock would have lasted ten minutes at most.
“Pleased to meet you, Doctor. I’ve heard much about you. How was the journey?” No perfunctory How are you feeling? Only the broad picture, no pressure, nothing difficult.
He lifted his eyes from his hands to the man across the desk. Abernathy sat behind a massive slab of wood, the surface stripped of anything spare: a slim leather notebook, a silver, surely expensive pen, and a porcelain pot with two cups. The psychiatrist wore a suit, dark green that could pass for black until the light caught a subtle weave. Fair hair slicked back, not a strand out of place. A face held in restraint, almost classical good looks. The eyes told the truth: grey, cold, searching, always on.
“Good to meet you, Dr Abernathy,” John said. “Train, then the Tube. I walked from the station.”
“Crowded?”
“Usual.”
“Any trouble finding us?”
“No. Your directions were clear.”
“Coffee or tea?”
A simple choice between two possibilities, neither allowing refusal.
“Coffee,” John said after a small pause, unsure why he agreed at all.
He drank in small sips. The coffee’s strength held him in the chair, fixing him to the moment so he could flee neither in body nor in thought. The session went on, and the details slid away. He stepped onto the pavement with his mind slightly tangled, as if he had passed through something not frightening, not painful, but deeply personal, almost intimate, though he had shared only ordinary words.
Rain teased the pavement into mirrors. Two blocks on, he paused at a tobacconist, bought cigarettes, and lit one under the drizzle. Smoke clawed his throat; he inhaled until his lungs burned. Six days left. What difference would it make?
Watson entered the house and stood in the hallway without switching on the light. Rain hissed at the windows as though trying to whisper something. He left the jacket on its hook, kept his boots, and went straight for the storeroom again. From one box, he dragged out an old printer, forgotten, dust-laden but still serviceable, and hauled it upstairs. Watson slid in a flash drive, opened the folder titled SH-01, and chose three files: the rooftop photograph, the call log screenshot, and the newspaper clipping—“SHERLOCK HOLMES: ANOTHER FRAUD?” in brash type.
The printer groaned, whirred; paper emerged reluctantly. John gathered the pages and laid them on the table beside the board. He sat for ten minutes doing nothing, then sighed and went to the board.
First up: the roof of St Bartholomew’s, sky iron-cold, unaware it would witness the irreversible. Below it, he pinned the call screenshot with numbers, date, time, and duration: three minutes forty-one seconds. No need to read, he knew every word by heart. To the right, he fixed the tabloid clipping with its shouting headline and the deliberately unflattering picture of Sherlock with his gaze averted, three-quarter profile, as though he truly had something to hide.
John stared at the article with unseeing eyes. Then he raised the marker and, just beneath the three sheets, wrote:
Why?
The question looked absurdly small, yet it was everything.
He felt like an idiot: not the partner of the world’s only consulting detective but merely a stubborn widower acting genius with a board and pen. His eyes dropped. Then, a heartbeat later, lifted again.
Sherlock wasn’t. He was the cleverest man John had ever known. And if he had done something, even if it seemed pointless, even if it had killed him— there was a reason. Sherlock never did anything without one.
John pressed his forehead into his palms, sensing his parched breath hitch and shudder.
“Tell me,” he whispered into the emptiness. “Give me something, Sherlock. Leave me one clue.”
Only rain tapped the sill in reply.