A/N: Wow, everyone, look, I've written something! I'm sure you'll be happy to see it's Sherlock, since I think most of you have followed me for that fandom. I hope y'all enjoy this little drabble, and keep in mind that it got a quick edit from me, but there might still be errors. Feel free to point them out c:

Also, I have another Sherlock thing that is kinda a follow up the my first one, in silent moments, that I keep trying to finish up so that I can post it. As well as that I have a Supernatural fanfic that is about halfway done, and will hopefully be published pretty soon. In the meantime, allons-y!

The awareness comes slowly at first, trickling in like water from a leaky tap, little bit by little bit until it fills him up like a man-shaped basin. Things take forms around him, rising through a cloudy grey fog like nighttime phantoms turned to stone, substantial and solid.

Because of who he is it does not take long to realize that while other objects and people and things may be tangible, he most certainly is not. He fades before them like a summer daydream or frost in the sunlight, gone before they even knew he was there. They pass around him, and he is an invisible, quiet eddy in the rushing burbling running living stream of their existences, standing still and silent and alone and unseen as they dance around him in an untouchable rhythmic beat.

He finds he is tethered, like a dog to a lead, only his unwanted anchor is a vacant shell, a cold dead body that used to belong to him, now an empty house buried under thick earth. He learns that despite having been set free of its crushing, oh-so-human confines he is still required not to drift too far. Every time he tries to slip away he herded back by some imperceptible shepherd that wishes to guard him from the hovering wolves, and he rails against this barrier, hurls himself at it, knowing instinctively that there is beauty on the other side.

One man catches his attention, tethers him in a different way to the fleeting world that shimmers around him. He knows the man, knows so so much, knows who his family is and what he had for breakfast and where his shoes are from and knows why he has been crying-

Why he has been crying.

He hears a quiet voice in his mind, a gentle soothing feminine tone that says something he knows he's heard before, spoken by lips that belong to a kind soul that wanted to help, You look sad when you think he can't see you.

Now he is sad and he knows the other man is sad, as obviously evidenced by the puffy redness around the the man's eyes, his friend's eyes, John's eyes, and neither of them can see the other. He wants to though, desperately, but no matter how much he speaks and yells and begs, John cannot hear him.

He is nothing if not tenacious though, and he tries every time John comes. They have overlapping, one-sided conversations, because John tells that empty house and cold stone slab about his days and his therapist and his job and how much he misses him and he loves him, always did really, ever since Afghanistan or Iraq. He tries to answer, speaks in the lulls where the only other noise is John breathing heavily and the rattle of old tree limbs, but John cannot hear him.

Until he begins to notice that maybe John can hear him, notices that his friend starts to cock his head in those soundless lulls, wrinkling his brow and frowning and staring with strange expressions. Finally comes a day when John informs him that he must be going crazy, that grief must have driven him to madness, because he keeps thinking he can see Sherlock, can catch the hushed whisper of his voice on the wind, and Sherlock himself can hardly believe the wonderfulness of this false insanity.

A little time passes and John slowly realizes that he is not crazy in the slightest, for those barest scrapes of sound grow to deep warm baritones, those corner-of-the-eye visions become glorious truths. Words can finally be shared in a language both can understand again, gazes can rest on oblique solidity.

Farewells may be passed.

Loss and grief and pain are human emotions that speak of life, and although Sherlock is neither right now he stills finds crystal liquid glimmering on his lashes and wetness on his cheeks that match John's a they stand in a damp boneyard on a bleak winter day that seems to have been created to match their feelings.

"Well," John says, voice rough with those half-shed tears, gaze cast to the leaf-strewn ground, "I guess this . . . is it. For real, this time."

The laws of death do not permit them to touch, but John wraps his arms loosely about the ghostly form of Sherlock anyway, his body shivering at the cold he transmits. Sherlock does his best to reciprocate, holding his limbs in an insecure, intangible embrace over his friend.

"I think, John," Sherlock says, even as he steps back and begins to fade away in the same manner he arrived, the tap dripping in reverse, "that I have and always will love you."

John's smile is the most perfect parting gift he could ever have asked for.