A/N: Thank you so much for clicking and reading. That last episode filled with me so many emotions I just had to take to my keyboard. Wanted to really explore John's mourning and his reasons for cutting Sherlock out fully. My first fanfiction, so I would be so grateful for reviews!

She is still holding him when he wakes. The blue of her eyes bores into him for an echo of a second, before they fade into the cracked paint of the wall opposite. His cheek feels the flutter of her touch, but the fingers that reach up to cup it are his own, so rough, so inadequate, his skin so utterly feeling of her absence. The sheets beneath him coil into quicksand; he sinks into them, into their fake, fake fake heat. A moan eats up his stomach, crawling from his gut to his throat to his mouth and out, into a selfish, unfeeling room which throws it back to him. And she is not here.

Suddenly the suffocation is too much to bear, and he collapses out of bed, the feeling of cold floor on his feet not quite reaching the fog in his brain. Somehow he makes it to the bathroom. His wrists whiten and his fingers claw into a clench on the sink. Shoulders heave. He deserves the excruciating ache his mind, his heart, his very bones carry, but sometimes he feels the weight begin to cripple him. A small whimper escapes.

"What the fuck do I do?"

And she is not-

Every day that passes, the part of him that wishes he was devoid of emotion grows. As devoid of it as he used to pretend Sherlock Holmes was.

"You made a vow!"

Yes he had, hadn't he? That wedding, he'd looked into those blue, bright, live – lifeless – eyes and promised love, constancy, fidelity. But he just couldn't let something so whole and pure envelop him entirely, not for long anyway. He had to take the number, feel its inky, murky weight in his pocket, send that first text, and set everything alight. Watch the orange tongues of flame circle around the marriage contract he had signed, just to feel the heat burning –

a bonfire, he had been trapped, unable to resist his destruction, Sherlock had saved him, his wife's eyes pleading along with her voice. Even in the blur of semi-consciousness, he had seen it right there in her face: If he dies, so do I –

He drives his fist into the grey wall.

The newspapers, the world, they all saw the spitting image of loyalty, the epitome of the honest and true companion in him. Wrong. Ever since the war, there was a shadow in some crevice of his heart that constantly craved danger, thrill: a thirst that could not be quenched by an entirely righteous life. Nobody had ever seen it, that dull red that flickered at the back of his eyes. No – Sherlock had seen it, and so, he realises, so had she –

Swallowing, almost choking, he begins the slow methodical process of living. It was necessary to wash his face. Necessary to brush his teeth, the sharpness of the toothpaste untasted. Necessary to shave the stubble. The beginnings of a moustache, he registers with a fresh slash of pain – you should put that on a T-shirt, her hair shakes as she stifles a laugh – and attacks it with fresh vigour. This grief was...nothing...like before, and so he could not allow any habit, any sign that could draw comparisons to the last time he had suffered loss.

But he had not really suffered, had he? He had thought most important person in his life gone, unreachable forever, and then Sherlock had waltzed right back into his life, in a waiter's costume no less, and he was allowed to fully breathe and live whole again. He was allowed two people who loved him the most in this world.

Something else broken. For it was only when he had lost all faith in him that he knew he had truly believed, idiotically, naively, blindly, that the man was invincible. Sherlock Holmes, the man who should have died, but lived, the man who saves him from the bonfire, the hound, the ticking bomb that was never truly about to explode. He had become this almost supernatural figure to him; of course on the surface he had never discarded danger, but deep down – his throat clogs anew with self hatred – he had begun to assume that threat was only ever a fantasy Sherlock would inevitably vanquish.

And so when his best friend held his gaze with such gravity over the (fake) glow of the dance floor, and vowed they would always be safe, he had honestly and utterly believed it.

"Bastard." He hisses, unclear and uncaring of who he is really addressing.

That is why he could no longer stomach the man's sight. He still repeats the mantra in his head, because it-was-Sherlock's-fault-she-died, that he could-have-done-more, he-promised-he-promised-he-lied-he-lied. But it sounds so hollow now. So full of bullshit. The real reasons lurk in his peripheral vision. He couldn't accept that it was his own fault for placing such high hopes in a man as fallible as himself, that he had deliberately, selfishly discarded the signs. He had chosen to hear the utter conviction in the voice that vowed, but not the uncertainty and fear in the eyes that made it. He had missed the burden that had been placed on the man's shoulders, only realised it when he too was carrying the weight of broken promises. Seeing him would force him to fully acknowledge the fatal mistake, force a shatter that would utterly break them both. For how terrible to pretend someone is other than human.

The phone rings. Another minute of someone trying to comfort without understanding how utterly undeserving of it he was. Another second spent wondering how politely he would have to tell the world to piss off, please, just a little longer.

He groans, and stumbles back into the bedroom before stopping still. There is a photo of her on the sidetable, grinning with that mischievous glint that had never once left her eyes, until everything had.

Like a child, he had riled at the injustice of her having secrets while he had none, and so had created one to keep. It had given him a cruel satisfaction at first, having something that was his alone, but now he stared back at the photo in the frame, so beautiful, so still, such an inadequate reminder of the imperfect love of his life and felt nothing but the sickness of shame. Now he had permanently become of those husbands, a

"Cheat."

The word is spat out of his mouth: hard, unforgiving and real in the cold light of day.

She'd never known that she needn't have been guilty for her lies, or maybe she had, and the wound of that had died with her. Beyond where he could hold her one last time, the tears flowing down his face, and tell her

sorry sorry sorry

for how utterly undeserving he was, and forever will be, of her.

The scream he lets out shatters, stabs, but does nothing for his dull ache. He is throwing the framed photo into the clock, anything to silence the mockery, the ticking of time passing on without her. It falls, pierced by one solitary crack, and the action fills him with nothing and there is a grand resolve of nothing and he sinks to the ground.

The crashing noise vibrates throughout the house. Inconsolable wails in the next room. For a moment, he catches the ghost of her perfume's scent, and he cannot see beyond the fact that the only one who will ever make him feel alive again is dead.

A crescendo fills his ears, of the phone still ringing and the child still screaming and the dull beat of nothing nothing nothing in his chest.

He feels so utterly unconnected to anything.