The coffee was ready.

John poured the scalding liquid into two mugs, and with clinical precision, placed two sugar cubes in one, and left the other as it was. He stared at the coffee mugs for a long moment.

"Coffee's ready," he said, in a half-whisper. He lifted the first mug, as though toasting the ceiling, then released and let it smash to the floor. It bled rivulets of brown onto the rug. "Oh, god," John murmured and rested his forehead against the wall.

John Watson was not insane. He was coping with a grief so profound, that it took him to his most primal place of emotional competence. He was by turns ferocious, guilty, devastated, gloomy, satirical, and pensive. He acted very strangely sometimes, and Mrs. Hudson would sit in the flat and ask him for "just another cup of tea, dear," when in reality, she wouldn't leave him alone in such a dark state of mind. Like a room hung with picture frames crooked a little to the left, nothing felt right, any longer. Flashes of the old life came to John in quiet moments, flickers of violin songs, ridiculous quarrels and Cluedo boards jackknifed to the mantle. Often he awoke in the middle of the night, bewildered and anxious, certain he had heard a haunting baritone calling to him from the kitchen.

If John had thought he'd sustained damage when returning from Afghanistan, it was nothing compared to what he lived with now. Civilian, soldier, civilian. That was the process, that was how it should be. But John was caught between worlds; a soldier struggling across the battlefield toward home, leaving his dearest friend in the dirt. He had lived through so much and been hurt so deeply that there was no way he could carry on as a civilian, or ever disremember the things he had seen. He knew better than most, that battlefields weren't always defined by open skies and bullets. He learned to see them everywhere, in everything. London was a battlefield. Life with Sherlock had been a battlefield. Friendship was a battlefield.

There had been a war, and no one could ever convince John otherwise. What other name was there for such heightened human experience of survival, trust, betrayal, fear and reckless courage? It had brought out the best and worst in everybody, and as the dust began to clear, John's heartache lifted somewhat. For when good and evil took their own lives, the scale leveled, and the world was given a chance to build a better world on a foundation of its mistakes.

Still, John did not forget what he and Sherlock had had, or what they could have had, if only Sherlock had decided to walk away from the rooftop's edge. It could have been magnificent, it really could have.

But John would never know.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.