I can't go back to the flat, you know?

Because it's no longer a flat; it's a fault. I can't help but think of you endlessly as I breathe in that space; imagine you, see your figure out of the corner of my eye, turning to see nothing, or awaiting for your body to appear from the kitchen or your room and I stare endlessly until my head falls, perhaps crying or too numb to do so. I was giving you a second chance, a chance at life and a chance to come home, but it's irrelevant.

The thought is just medicine.

It is broken there, as am I, but it hurts less when I don't see the wallpaper, the skull on the mantle, your violin resting next to your chair. I fixated on the emptiness of your chair for what seemed like an age. But not for nearly as long as I lay in your bed.

The first night, after all the police and the hospital and feeling like I was underwater, like time was moving fast, yet not at all, I refused Lestrade's offer for me to stay at his place and escaped it all, returned home, silent and still.

I knew what this was. I hated knowing what this was. Denial. I wished it wouldn't hit me for weeks, months, years, become crazy and mutter about how you still drive me insane with your wild experiments and late night criminal chases to every pitying soul who watched me go mad.

But I couldn't allow myself to accept the madness.

Because you fixed me.

When I was sick and nightmaring and not eating and lusting the taste of gunmetal on my tongue for when I would pull the trigger and finally end it, you found me. Not by your doing or mine, but you noticed me and pulled me into your fast-paced world, an incautiousness I failed to realize that I had missed, been longing for.

I ate. Life regained color and sound. I had a place. A purpose.

I did not have another nightmare since about six months into my partnership with you.

On that night, however, the night of your fall, I knew I would begin to nightmare again.

But I wanted to remember you as you were, not as you are, because you healed me, and I did not desire to make that meaningless by dissolving into the wounded soldier I was before I met you, before I hadn't one to open to, to be opened by.

So, after what may have been a few days of existing in timelessness in that flat, ignoring calls and only sending texts to ensure those who were concerned that I was alive, my heart still grasping at the false reality that you could still be, I suddenly felt the earth grow weak.

I was realizing.

I then moved slowly to the only place that I hadn't gone in our home: your room.

I opened the door, stood in the entrance, and inhaled.

It didn't smell of you. Well, it did, of the chemicals you used to disinfect, and of your cologne, and of your dry-cleaned suits. The air lacked the scent of you, though, that had etched into your chair, and especially the sofa.

I looked about your tidy room, the bare floor, the perfectly closed wardrobe, the too-well-tucked sheets on your bed, married to the fluffed, parallel pillows.

I had been tempted to check your sock index. I was almost appalled at first when it was the first danger night and I was looking for a possible stash and saw that pristinely folded, color and type coordinated apparel aligned in flawless rows in their wooden enclosure. You were so irate when you found that I had crammed them all back in after a good rifle through. You spent an hour refolding them and reorganizing them, just to decide that they had all been ruined and took them all to the dry cleaners, voicing rather malevolent mutterings to me on your way out.

On the Christmas danger night, I took a picture on my phone of your socks, looked through them, and placed them back matching the original order. You came home, went straight to your room, and after a sigh, some mutterings, and a rather pointed grunt, you threw out a bag that made soft 'thud', exclaiming, "Better, but you still spoiled 46.8431 percent of them."

I felt torn. Because as I stood there in your bedroom doorway, I knew I was there to ruin. There was no longer a you to care about the arrangement of your socks, or the cleared floor, or the flat sheets. But I had to undo something because I was breaking, the painful light of reality that you are gone was shining through and I had to make sure it rightfully shattered the shell of hope, although it burned to dishonor your last physical presence pressed into your possessions.

My legs, or rather my phantom-injured limb, began to give way and therefore decided for me, for I stumbled to the bed, bent over it as I ripped the top sheet from its meant to be frozen position and crawled under it.

This smelled more of you, but only just. You changed your sheets often. But it seemed as though you slept in this set at least once before you died

You died

You died

You died

You. Are.

…

I pressed my face into the softly scented pillow of yours, vaguely similar to the scent of your shampoo, your curls, and I saw your warm heart that you reveled to me only in bursts and sparks, your beautiful brain that you showed to everyone, but you admitted your mistakes to me. Images of you appear in rapid succession until I see you fall.

And then that disintegrated, and the cold crushing blow that you are dead finally hit me, and the pain was not lessened by how much I wanted this stage to arrive quickly.

My medicine.

It was agony, pouring my tears into your pillow, clutching your sheets. I knew Mrs. Hudson was downstairs. I knew she could hear me. I found I was rather glad that she did.

I fell asleep in your bed, dipped in and out of dreams, memories of you, half safe, half not, but with me fearing the dark even as it was light. Your blood spattered face and hair eventually made its way into my subconscious and I awoke sobbing, waves of your loss striking me again and again.

I lay there for so long, hardly registering the light changes that came from your windows, unable to go back to sleep, or move, shifting between feeling nothing and everything. And after eternity, I caressed your sheets, arose from the mattress, abandoned the tear-stained ruin there and made my way to the door, and without looking back, left your room.

Then my gaze befell the living room and the kitchen and the walls and all of it, telling me that that wasn't enough. All of it was hurting, tearing into me. I had to leave for good. At least for a very long while.

I grabbed my coat, stepped into my shoes, and did give the flat one last look over, each detail like salt poured into a thousand wounds, insanity edging behind each piece of furniture, tempting me to see you.

And I stepped out.

It's been a year now. I don't dare return to our flat, but I still want you to not be dead. I don't hope, but I need. Because although I have picked it all up and started again and now live with a beautiful woman and the limp only comes back sometimes, only 46-point-whatever-decimals-you-said-that-day of my life is back. Everything is so boring. I almost hate to use your word. Almost.

Tedious.

Dull.

I seem to be becoming you, what you said you were when I met you, so bitter and mechanical and aloof, but in actuality, full of sorrow.

It angers me that I don't know more about your past, about the depths of your anguish, the origins of your repressed warmth. I suppose I can always ask Mycroft, but I can never ask you.

Stupid.

You had sewn me back together. And now I have become unwoven. Not to where I was, but an alternative displacement, and I don't like it much better than the place I had been before I knew you.

Nonetheless I am blessed to have known you.

And cursed.

From all that medicine, you had mended me.

You were my medicine, Sherlock.

And perhaps we were medicine to one another, but I failed you in the end. You were enough for me, but I wasn't enough for you. You shone too brightly for this world, were too human, and I knew you for real. I doubtlessly should have told you that more often, every time we laughed together, every time I felt like punching that smirk off your face, because I knew why it was there, and I was privileged for you to let me in, into the side of you no one else was privy to.

However, I often hate you, despise you for making me see you on that roof, for making me plead with you to stop, telling you that I believed in you even if no one else did. It was selfish of you to have me present for your end. You knew I would do anything to save you. I would have taken you home, made you tea, sat with you until I was confident enough to leave your side (which would not have been until a considerable length of time) and held you if you had let me.

I would have been your medicine that day, but you refused a dose of me.

Ultimately, I know why I was the one you called. I would have preferred to have been told in any other situation, or perhaps not learned it at all. Anything for you to still be alive and to have not have ended it all in despair and self-doubt.

Oh how I had wished we hadn't released our handcuffs, that we were still locked together to meet the same fate, whether choosing death or life. But you wouldn't be alone.

And neither would I.

I am so very alone without you.

With the kind of work we were in, one would think I would have thought about the possibility of dying more often. Well, I had. There were so many instances where I was sure you were going to get yourself killed. So I was your soldier, your action man. We were supposed to survive, or die together, or I would sacrifice myself for you.

I rather romanticized it, actually.

You know, Lestrade, Mycroft, and even Donovan, before she changed her mind, had let me in on how you were before I came along. Just a peek, here and there. Your brother or the Detective Inspector would find you in the gutter at any given moment. The D.I. had first met you when you barged into a taped off area, just starting to come down from a high, shouting deductions this way and that, until causing such a ruckus and an audible refusal to be removed, Lestrade had you arrested. But he noticed how your seemingly wild findings actually made a strange sort of sense, and with them he solved the crime, and began to use your brain in exchange for the thrill of the work. But you were reckless, sometimes disappearing for weeks, or refusing the offer at times. I supposedly righted that, providing you a bit of order and a bit of quiet that you must have absorbed. Lestrade once said to me that you were a great man, and after you died, he decided to say that I made you a good one.

And I almost believe it.

I was… something to you. I repaired you, in a way. I understood what was you as opposed to what was hurting you. It did upset me, what people said, what people now say.

I suppose I'm considered the madman, anyway, for I still defend you when everyone is sure I had been hoodwinked, pulled into your lies and magic tricks, infatuated, in love, and still wearing the rose-colored glasses you have given me to see you in a better light.

But I don't care what they think of me. I hadn't these people before you, and now it's just the same.

Except you are no longer here for me to return to, to walk along side with, to glance at you and have my gaze met, to convey our thoughts and our moods while everyone else got it wrong.

I miss that the most, really. Though it is hard to choose just one part of you, of us, that I yearn for more than the rest.

I miss being woken up by your violin. Sometimes beautiful, and I would just listen. Sometimes cacophonous, and I would pound downstairs and demand for you to knock it off, probably using more profanity than I recall. The early morning playing didn't happen all the time, but often enough. Although now I would sell everything I have to hear you play, even if only in the middle of the night.

I miss your visits to your mind palace, which you didn't dismiss me for at times, and I would hear you talk nonsense, utter single words after silence, or after no silence. I would hear you sing lyrics, make wild gestures, reach as though you are aiming to grab a book from the highest shelf, or lie upon the floor and appear to try to crawl to the center of the Earth. While your usual deductions gradually lost their splendor and became the everyday, watching you enter your mind and shut everything else out always drew amazement out of me.

You, my medicine, and I became addicted to you, built up a tolerance.

And the withdrawal is excruciating.

It is getting better. With each passing day I don't think of you less, but the thought of you is beginning to hurt less. Only just. Only now. At least in comparison to the moment I left the flat, never to have returned.

Maybe I will one day return and I will cry, but I will also laugh, have a memory about you, something you said as you paced about the kitchen, and it won't hurt. It will actually feel good, warm.

I will eventually come to terms with what you did, how you decided to leave, and be at peace, have closure. I'm supposed to say all the things I didn't say to get close to achieving that.

I have said a lot. Not all, not yet. It's been a year and I'm still analyzing exactly what I did want to say, what I wanted you to know. I'm still not sure what we were to each other, what we wanted to be, what we could have been.

No. I do know. I just don't feel the certainty of that yet.

I may never. I almost need your permission and I can't discuss it with you.

But I am certain that you cured me. You rebuilt me when I was broken and I will forgive you for breaking me again when you departed. It is perhaps foolish of me to have expected you to have been in more than just a chapter of my life. Or perhaps it isn't, because you were so important, more important than anyone else who influenced the progression of my being.

I think of all of this, and I think of you, unceasingly think of you, relive the memories through the pain because I have to.

But I know.

It's just medicine.