A/N: Post-Reichenbach.

"I brought...his coat," Lestrade said, standing very still in the doorway to 221b. The thing in his arms was splashed with old blood, the red thread of the buttonhole stabbing out from the dark.

"Ah." John wanted to say yes, or no, why would you bring that here, or get it out of my sight. He wanted to eat it and burn it and live in it. He was trying desperately not to cry at the sight of it, able to force a stiff nod but nothing more. "I think," he attempted, "that, Mycroft-"

"Yeah," Lestrade said, gracefully taking over. "Mycroft said...well, whatever he said, he sent me to bring it here." He shifted on his feet. The bloodied collar crackled in his hand. "I can-"

"No." John shook his head. He wrested the coat from Lestrade, and Lestrade made himself disappear.

John buried the coat in his bed, on the off chance that some remainder of its former scent would soak into his sheets. The morgue smell was what came through, mostly, but that was fine, too. Formaldehyde did as good a job as anything else of reminding him of Sherlock: he'd smelled of it the day they'd met, faintly sweaty from beating the recently deceased with a riding crop, wearing the stench like a shroud that kept everyone at arm's length - everyone except John.

Perhaps Sherlock would never be a corpse, could never die: perhaps he had escaped death by wearing its perfume like a skin.

But there was the coat, and there was the blood, and there, woven into the collar, were two dark hairs, longish and curly. John cried for hours.

John woke up in the middle of the night, septic with despair, his arm worked into the sleeve of Sherlock's coat, his nose pressed into the tweed and blood. He wanted to scream. He kicked off the sheet and went for his laptop.

ANGRY, he wrote,and clicked 'post' because he just didn't care anymore, and because a scream wasn't any good if nobody heard it.

His therapist would be so proud.

Days later he returned to the laptop, in the same state: furious, sleepless, agonized.

You killed Sherlock Holmes, he typed. All of you. You could have saved him. You could have believed in him, but you didn't.

John let that sit for a while. It felt a bit extreme, but not inaccurate. In a fit of daring, he hit 'post,' and snapped the laptop shut. For a while, he stood in the middle of the sitting room, hesitating between bed and the delete button.

Bed won.

He felt better already.

I don't blame Sherlock for what he did, John typed, between forced sips of his tea. Tea was a horrible ritual without Sherlock's occasional organic solids in the kettle. It was boring. Everything was boring.

Everyone's always just trying to escape their own tempest. His just happened to be in him.

But, no, John thought, that wasn't fair. Because while everyone has a tempest - even lowly army doctors, even months away from Afghanistan (though Afghanistan is the least of it now; those deaths cooled and dark in comparison to the napalm of Sherlock's) - not everyone jumps off a building.

I shouldn't blame him, John revised.

He didn't bother to hedge over posting it. Everyone he knew had either stopped reading the blog - because how interesting could he be, without Sherlock? - or was being kind enough not to mention that his entries had taken a decided turn for the stark. John wished someone would bring it up: he wanted a row, he wanted to yell at someone, hash it out, and Sherlock wasn't going to turn up for the honors.

John downed the rest of his tea in one go, so tannic it made his jaw clench. He'd run out of milk.

The next time John blogged, it wasn't from sleeplessness but the result of a nine-hour bender. His eyes were itchy, either from staring too long at the monitor or from the whiskey fumes, or both.

Sherlock was special, he ticked into the little white box, one painstaking key at a time. Perhaps he should have thought harder before drinking as much as he had, because every other letter was wrong at first.

But the truth is, that for all the ways he was special, there were a thousand ways he wasn't. And he hated that. Hated it.

It was true, God help him. He'd never have made the mistake of telling the tall, proud Sherlock so, but, while some of Sherlock's DNA had undoubtedly been made of silicon, the rest had been beautifully ordinary.

John wished he could include a visual, here, the means to understand exactly the sort of self-hatred Sherlock felt: Sherlock's face, his eyes, as he came to the verge of apologizing - the verge of actually speaking the words, "I'm sorry," because he'd lost his composure in a way he thought vulgar or demeaning or horrible because he'd grown up with real sociopaths, and people without feelings invariably find it vulgar when a man comes so violently that tears stream down his face and he makes sounds that aren't words.

John had gone weeks without hearing those sounds from Sherlock. Now, it turned out, he hadn't had the weeks to waste. And those sounds - if he could hear them, just once more: they'd had meanings, he'd understood them, and he'd gone weeks without hearing them because Sherlock had tried so hard to keep his mouth shut that he'd bitten his lips bloody. He'd clamped his own hand, John's hand, anything at all over his mouth to keep himself quiet, to keep from doing something "embarrassing" for which he'd have to atone, to go again to the precipice of apology when he'd regained his sanity.

And John could kill someone for that.

He worked for you. He worked under you, though I think we can all agree he didn't deserve the indignity. He let you run him like a machine, and you shamed the soul out of him. You made fun and you made fun and you paraded him around in that little hat and I tried to tell him it was all in good fun but it wasn't, and I knew it, and you know it, and in his heart of hearts (yes) Sherlock knew it. He'd known it all his life.

Were you afraid of him? Was that it? Afraid he sat around all day, picking apart your little lives, knew all your secrets? Well, he did: he did all of that - he couldn't have helped it, really - except it took him five minutes at the most, and even your deepest, darkest parts bored him to tears. And, by the way, no one's ever popped up at you in a dark alley trying to use your secrets against you, have they? Even as badly as you've treated him. And what does that tell you about the kind of man he was? He was good to you - in his own way - and you hated him, believed the worst about him, made him alone in the world when it turned against him.

You put him on that roof. You might as well have pushed him off.

Post.

How many of them would ignore this one?

All of them, actually. All of them had ignored it.

How was that even possible?

After a confusingly quiet day-after, John went back to the laptop, thinking that maybe they'd saved their retaliatory vitriol for the comments, and found, instead, that it was all gone. Every entry, since Sherlock's death. John scrolled and searched and still: nothing, there was nothing. He didn't understand how. In the back of his mind, Sherlock's hard logic encroached, whispering, nudging him toward the only reasonable conclusion.

"I'm not crazy." John stared at the screen, telling him the opposite. "I'm not." And he wrote it on the screen, typed it, watched the words unfurl as real as the other words he'd typed and seen and now were gone, never there at all.

I'm not crazy.

John blinked his eyes clear. If he hit 'post,' would the words disappear? Was this how it had always happened? Was he dreaming? Delusional? If he were imagining this, now, then what else was he imagining? What else had he imagined? Was his overwhelming sadness just a figment of his imagination? And, if that were true, could Sherlock not be dead? Could Sherlock please, please not be dead?

He refused to take his hands from the keyboard; the keys had started a gentle rattle where his fingers had begun to shake. "Please," he said. He didn't even know what that meant anymore: what he was asking, or who he was asking it of. Just. Please.

The keyboard stopped rattling, suddenly. John looked down. There were two long, white fingers between his wrists and the laptop's edge. Sherlock would have chastised him for not ruling out the impossible, but John didn't waste a single second believing that those fingers somehow belonged to anyone but a dead man.

He jerked his head back around at the same time that Sherlock said, "Wait," in his strongest voice. John froze in place, his eyes locked on the face over his shoulder - that face so strange it would never be entirely familiar - and Sherlock held his wrists still.

"Ten seconds," Sherlock said, fast as machine-gun fire. John nodded dumbly. The volume of blood in his head was climbing with no ceiling in sight. His ears were ringing already, and dizziness was imminent. Why couldn't he breathe? Why couldn't he move? Sherlock was counting down the seconds quietly, his eyes shifting, deep in analysis, solving some problem that John didn't know, didn't care, couldn't see-

-and then on the tiniest, shakiest inhale, Sherlock's body tipped forward and his face pressed unceremoniously to John's: foreheads and noses and cheeks and - god, Sherlock - lips. The slight push of tongue cracked John, released him, hit some valve in his chest. When Sherlock pulled away, John sucked in air like a drowner.

Silence.

Then:

"Ten seconds?" John breathed, barely.

"I couldn't safely assume you'd avoid my nose and teeth, this time," Sherlock said, releasing John's wrists.

More silence.

Then:

"You kept my coat,"from Sherlock.

"I kept you." John said.

And then nothing but lips and teeth and hands and tears.

I believe in Sherlock Holmes, John types.

"Present tense, John?"

John jumps. Sherlock's hand on his shoulder could have come from nowhere, appeared from nothing. John turns, sees him standing there, and assumes he's read every word already.

"I'm..." he starts.

"Very drunk," Sherlock finishes, and it's true. John had gone on a drunk to deal with Sherlock being gone; now it feels symmetrical to do it again, to get used to him being back, as if everything between had just been a nightmare. They regard each other quietly, and finally John's shoulders slump.

"You going to delete this one, too?"

"Not anymore," Sherlock says.

"Doesn't it make you angry," he accuses, his hands knotting in his lap, "how they treated you."

"Should it?"

"Don't." John's head dips, expression charring. "Don't pretend in front of me. That's for them. Only. For them."

"It doesn't," he says, simply.

"Why?" John asks. "I just- I don't understand that." His whole body flags; the alcohol is pulling him under. Sherlock's hand slips beneath his shoulder and gets him gently to his feet. "They didn't believe you. They left you alone," John insists. "And you're just going to go back?"

"Not alone," Sherlock says, and touches the tip his nose to the soft, pink curl of John's ear. "Bed, John." Sherlock sends him off with a light push, watches him shuffle off, and makes sure to click 'post' before closing the laptop.