This is the last chapter of this short fic. Thank you for all the comments, favorites and follows! One reviewer, Bianca Valdez, had some great ideas I could have used if this story went into a different direction, so I'm sorry I couldn't use them here. This was alrady a complete fic when I started posting it, and alway meant to be short one.
Please note the genres.
Beta'ed by Lohis, thank you!
Five.
John Watson opens his eyes and the end begins.
He slowly comes to, disoriented, blinking his eyes open. The world swims unsteadily in his vision until it clears into the shadowed image of his bedroom ceiling. The lights are off and the only illumination comes from the window that isn't fully covered with the thick brown-red curtain.
His body feels stiff and heavy, as if his muscles are slowly remembering how to operate again. His hand twitches and he tries to turn his head, and does so, with great effort though.
He tries to remember how he got to sleep, because he is fully clothed and lying on top of the covers, with his legs uncomfortably hanging off the bed. His leg is throbbing again, the phantom pain once more returned.
He gets a feeling, that awful feeling that something horrible has happened and he's just not remembering it yet.
His hand twitches again and feels something cold and metallic in its still little numb grasp.
He freezes, and slowly tilts his head back to look at the wall behind him.
A warm-brown wall with a large red stain to it, not yet even dried up. Right behind him.
And he remembers.
Remembers the tiredness, the weariness, the nightmares and the whispers that had carried on an on, crumbling his resolve every passing night.
He remembers the haze of alcohol, the feel of the Browning in his hand, the thought of There's one place he maybe won't get to me.
He remembers tightening his finger over the trigger.
He doesn't remember the gunshot.
He scrambles up then, his hands coming up to run over his face, under his jaw, across the back of his head. But there is no wound, no blood, no sign that he had only a moment ago tried to blow off his brain.
Going by the splatter of blood behind him, he had succeeded.
He had succeeded.
And now he's standing in the middle of his room, in the darkness, in the quiet lonely flat.
His breathing grows loud and ragged in the silence as he bends nearly double, trying to control the blooming despair in his gut. He nearly leaps for his gun again, fully prepared to empty the whole goddamn magazine full of bullets into his brain. But Sherlock's (the real one's) voice snorts in his head, drawling Really, John? The evidence is right in front of you. What do you expect to change when you repeat the experiment?
His trembling breaths turn into ugly wet sobs that shudder through his whole body.
And then he knows.
There are two options:
1) He is mad, finally lost his mind, hallucinating, and nothing he does really matters because it's not real.
2) It's real. It's real and he cannot get away.
He thought he could get away. At first he thought he could outlast it. Then he thought he could outsmart it. Then he thought he'd escape for good.
And it hadn't worked.
Nothing will work.
Except...
He sits on the bed, head in his hands as he finally shouts:
"Yes! Can you hear me, you bastard? I SAY YES!"
And the room is filled with light.
.
Twelve minutes later, an angel appears in the middle of the living room of 221b.
Castiel stands there in the oppressing silence.
He closes his eyes.
He has failed.
.
Some six months later, Sherlock bloody Holmes marches back to London, the remnants of Moriarty's criminal web falling apart in his wake.
He returns to Baker Street in one big swirl of that ridiculous coat.
No one has time to tell that the other occupant is not there anymore.
And that he's nowhere to be found.
.
Some five months after that, a word appears into a brick wall in a small town in the United States.
It reads "CROATOAN".
After that, it's the end of the world.
.
AN:
Thank you for reading! Hopefully it doesn't feel like this ended too abruptly, and sorry for the delay. I am aware that this doesn't quite go by the canon, but it felt like the right way to end things.
Feedback is always welcomed!
-TheShatterpoint