I was so alone, and I owe you so much.

John does not consider himself to be the sentimental type. He doesn't keep many mementos to mark the passage of his life. Never wrote letters home when he was in the army. Despite the blog has never really felt himself to be particularly eloquent.

That was before though.

Before The Fall. Before the blood and the devastation and the empty eyes that haunt him when he shuts his own.

Now he clings to odd scraps – ticket stubs, receipts for meals, notes scribbled in Sherlock's slanted hand. The flat, whilst cleaner and less full of body parts and chemicals, is cluttered with his memories. The walls are covered with pieces that link him back to Before. That link him back to Sherlock. It is a spiders web of thoughts and endless conversations that play on loop inside his head.

And the letters.

Without Sherlock to talk to, to analyse and strip apart the inside of his head he feels too full, as though there is too much trying to break free. He feels it just beneath his skin – the constant itch of words and moments that he saves up to tell Sherlock, only to remember that he isn't there. Mid laugh, mid thought, mid breath – the realisation knocks him senseless every time. It never eases, never relents the constant aching emptiness that is the lack of Sherlock.

The first letter was an accident.

Drunk scrawls. Notes of desperate loneliness. Of guilt and horror and anger at being left behind.

He found the letter the next morning – couldn't bear to look at it; couldn't bear to throw it away. Turned the pages, folds and cuts and pressed lines into origami birds, a trick Sherlock had taught him one sodden day a week into the boredom from no case. Right before he'd taken John's books and built a replica of tower-bridge in the middle of the floor they'd had to manoeuvre around for days after.

He strung the birds up from the ceiling, tipped back to watch them flutter in the breeze from the open window.

The second letter was more deliberate. A soft echo of sentiment that he could not seem to contain within his thoughts any longer. He had to tell Sherlock, to say the words and let the slow unfurling of emotions splay across the page from his pen. Once done, folds, presses, neat lines at deliberate angles and strung up by the first.

Now there are hundreds.

A whole flock of paper birds that hang like twisted mobiles stretching out across the living room ceiling. At night John leaves the window open and sits in the darkness listening to them rustle and whisper his secrets to the air.

They are filled with thoughts and wishes, memories and anecdotes, observations that John knows Sherlock would have teased out of him like thread. Soft prayers and pleas – to not be dead, to come home, to not leave John here alone where he cannot follow. Anger fills some, resentment others, but the ones filled with love outstrip them all. Always he ends with the only sentiment of love he can express, because he could not say the words when Sherlock was alive to hear them, and it would be an insult to whisper them now. I was so alone, and I owe you so much.

There are so many now they spill out of the sitting room, hang from the light fittings in the kitchen, spiral lazily over the stairs and tumble haphazardly into John's room. The only place he will not hang them is Sherlock's room. He refuses to go in there – except when he has had one too many tumblers of whiskey and curls sobbing into sheets that long since stopped smelling of him.
Sherlock would have found the birds intriguing, an oddity, but never would have tolerated them in his own space – would most likely have set fire to them if John had ever tried to put them in there, and John tells him so in one letter, hanging it directly outside Sherlock's door.

He continues to write; benedictions, prayers to a God he doesn't believe in for a miracle he knows can never happen. Because if he stops that means Sherlock is really, truly gone. That means that all John has left is the musty forgotten scent of him in the sheets on his bed, and the dreams of falling that never turn to flight.

One more miracle, Sherlock, for me. Don't be… dead. Would you do that? Just for me. Just stop it. Stop this…

John's steps are slower these days. Gone is the boundless energy of the soldier. Gone is the flighty adrenaline of a life lived at Sherlock's side. The walk from the surgery to home takes longer now than it ever used to, and it is almost full dark by the time he pulls himself up the stairs at Baker Street.

He can hear the whispers of the birds in the darkness, and he pauses for a moment in the doorway to allow his eyes to adjust. Adjust to the gloaming that has swallowed the room in the hours he's been gone. He doesn't turn the lights on, doesn't want to see the emptiness that greets him now.

He drops his bag, shrugs his coat off and stops.

A cars headlights sweep past and the room is bathed for a moment in unnatural shadows and sharp lines of light, illuminating the birds that bob and sway and speak a thousand words of his to him. Caressing the soft hulks of furniture that rise out of the darkness. Sliding across the hard planes and angles of Sherlock.

For there is no one else it could be. John would know that silhouette anywhere. Could map out with a ruler and pencil the lines and movement that build and shape to make Sherlock. Sherlock standing in the middle of the room, in the middle of a sea of birds. Sherlock who should be cold and rotting deep beneath the ground, not breathing quietly in the darkness of their flat.

John gasps, a soft, low sound that is almost a moan and sags against the door frame. And Sherlock doesn't turn, but John can hear the smile in his voice as he whispers, "John."

One, two, three steps to cross the room and John's hands are fisting in Sherlock's coat, turning him, touching him, skimming across his face, his arms, his chest. Mapping out what his eyes are telling him but he cannot yet believe.

Sherlock's face is wet and John lifts a finger to his lips and tastes tears. Tears and harsh breaths and the unmistakable feel of hard planes of muscles beneath his fingertips.

John breathes out his name and pulls him closer, breathes it out again and pulls Sherlock's head down to his, touches their foreheads together. He cannot get close enough. Cannot feel enough, see enough to prove that this is real. Is it real? Or has he finally tumbled down into madness. But dear God if this is madness never let him up. Hold him down here in the darkness with the birds and Sherlock because it is the most beautiful madness he has ever known.

"John. My John." Sherlock's words skim out across his skin, tangle in his hair along with his fingers as he pulls John tight against him.

John can feel the thrum of Sherlock's heartbeat beneath his hand, feel the slick wetness of his tears, taste the hot skud of his breath against his cheek, and he feels a part of him that has been coiled tight inside begin to loosen. A keening sound of despair, of loss and mourning fills the air and Sherlock pulls him tighter.

Anger will come later. Harsh words and bitter fights at being left, at being lost, at being left behind. But for now John is content to simply hold and be held in the darkness surrounded by a sea of paper birds.