5 - Seeking Solace

He knew that he was being stupid. A tombstone couldn't hear him. Couldn't understand the pain behind the sobs he was choking on. For a while he had tried to stay away. Stay away from Bakers Street, from St. Bart's and the lab. Stay away from Mrs. Hudson and from any skulls, and most definitely from the reflective black of the tombstone that was the only memorial to the man who had been everything. Those first few weeks were the worst, those weeks when he had tried to stay away. The pitying looks from Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade. He wasn't sure if they believed the lies or not. He was fairly sure that the landlady would never turn away from Sherlock like that, but the detective inspector had a police force to organize and some part of John respected that. Not much, but he could understand the motivation.

Now, sitting with his back against the tombstone, he remembered the times he had made Sherlock  quit smoking cold turkey. He was starting to understand how hard that was. When he had been trying to let Sherlock Holmes go, John Watson had been wallowing in grief. He often spent days in his hotel bed, unable to get up or move, just battling with the fact that the driving force of his life had suddenly been confined by the earth. It had taken two weeks for him to drag himself back to the grave site and now he was slowly being able to wean himself off visiting. He was down to once a day now and taking Sundays off when it was too crowded. Sherlock wouldn't have liked having John around all the time. He needed to think and no doubt deduce the private lives of the other families wandering about the cemetery. A tear slipped off the end of his nose at the thought

The grief was manageable now. He could function. Buy milk, hunt around for a job, go on dates (most of which had failed spectacularly) and reclaim some of what his life had been. The problem was that without Sherlock, John's life reverted to what it had been in those first few weeks back from the army. He had been drifting, unable to find a path to walk on, forced to trudge through monotonous forest of life. The only consolation, if that was what it was, was that his bank balance didn't seem to be changing. He suspected Mycroft, but he hadn't seen the man since the funeral and he didn't want to . He vaguely remember punching the manipulative bastard in the nose.

Sherlock would have laughed.

Then he would have asked if John had some sort of proclivity for punching people in the face.

He let another tear slip down his nose before opening the book on his lap and starting to read aloud. He realized that teaching a dead man about the solar system was neither helpful nor productive, but he did it anyway. It filled the hours when he sat here knowing that Sherlock would have hated the boredom which was seeping into the corners of his mind not occupied by numbness and also not able to tear himself away from his perch beside the black marble. As a result, his addled mind had presented a solution. He'd teach Sherlock all the things he'd been too busy to learn in life. By the time he was lucid enough to realize how spectacularly crap that idea was, he'd been doing it for too long to care. Sometimes he felt like a parent, reading a bedtime stories to a child. 'Now this is Pluto, Sherlock, can you say Pluto?' John almost formed a smile at the image of Sherlock's expression should he ever had actually have said that to him. If Sherlock had ever gotten sick, would he have asked John to read to him? Not about Pluto, certainly, but...

John looked down at the book, suddenly doubting it's accuracy since it still seemed to assume that Pluto was a proper planet. He talked to Sherlock about that for a while. At first he had wondered where to direct his words. Logically, he should talk to the ground which currently entombed his best friend, or at heaven, if one believed in that sort of thing. At least, he should talk to the tombstone, but it was only a symbol really and was a better seat than the ground. In the end, he ended up just talking to the air at large, addressing the man's spirit rather than his body. Every so often he wondered at the point of him being here. It certainly wasn't helping Sherlock, nothing could help him now, the question was whether it was helping John or not. Theoretically, there was nothing he could possibly gain from being here so often, then again, it was only natural for him to want to grieve the death of his best friend. Then again, Sherlock wouldn't have wanted him to do it. He would have told John to leave and move on with his life. No, that's not true. Sherlock would tell him to stop being an idiot and to go do something productive. If he was in a particularly good mood, he might make a joke that John should go to St. Bart's to read to the corpses there.

It was dark before he trudged home to Bakers Street. His brief attempt to find another flat had been a dismal failure, ending with him trudging back to Mrs. Hudson and her endless cups of tea within the week. He fit his key into the lock, but didn't try and turn it just yet. The landlady knew where he went every afternoon, despite the fact that John continually lied and told he that he went out job hunting instead. She wasn't there when he finally worked up the courage to walk into the building. He was trudging up the stairs when his mobile began to ring. He dug it out of his pocket and saw an unknown number. He didn't have any good reason to ignore it and if it was a solicitor he was fully ready to tell them off, so he hit the receive button.

"Hello?" John asked of the phone.

There was silence on the other end of the phone. John could hear the sound of breathing and of passing cars, but no voice.

"Hello? Can you hear me?"

Still no answer.

"This is John Watson speaking, you called me. Did you get a wrong number?"

There was a click as the call was disconnected. John pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it, confused. The moment of confusion passed however and he continued to climb up to his room, not looking at the green room or the carefully preserved mess with a practiced indifference. He lay down for the night once he had put away the books and changed into his pajamas, all thoughts of the mysterious phone call already gone from his mind.

On the other side of London, a tall figure with a head of dark curls was crumpled on the floor of a phone booth staring at the rain that washed down the glass sides. Slowly, he stood up, opened the door, as tuned his collar up against the wind as he raised a hand to hail a cab.