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John has been thinking about shooting his brains out.
Not considering it, not quite, at least not yet, but thinking about it. The idea comes upon him when he least expects it. He’ll be in the kitchen fixing a cup of tea, not dwelling upon anything particularly depressing, when suddenly he’s seeing a vivid mental image of himself backing up against the refrigerator, pushing his gun up under his chin, tilting his head back and squeezing the trigger.
In his mind, it’s only sometimes under his chin. Other times it’s against his temple, his eyes squeezed shut in preparation for the shot he’ll never hear, or in his mouth, clamped obscenely between his lips.
He’s not depressed, as he understands it. He’s in mourning, for sure. He’s sad sometimes. But it’s never in those sad moments that he looks at the wall of his bedroom and imagines what the spatter would look like if he were to stand here and do it, or here, or lie down on his bed, or sit in front of his computer. It’s in the quiet moments, the moments in which Sherlock would--
No. That is a door John does not open. Behind it he can sense real madness, the kind of all-consuming, hospital-green melancholy that really might end with a bullet in his frontal lobe. He doesn’t fancy that kind of danger. He’s not that kind of veteran.
The Browning sits in his bedside drawer, gathering dust. John does not dare look at it when he’s in one of those moods. He doesn’t think he’d do it, not really, but it doesn’t stop him worrying that he might.
---
Sherlock has been thinking about finding John dead.
The first time it happened, he was bleaching his freshly-cropped hair in a seedy hotel in Nice. He had been thinking through his list of connections in the area, working out a plan, mentally connecting Moriarty’s people in London with his contacts on the Continent, when abruptly he was seeing John in the bathtub, the water red and still. The image was so vivid that he gasped and reeled backwards, dropping the bottle of bleach. He stripped off his gloves and texted Molly, ordering her to check on John.
Stupid. You’re being stupid. It’s a hallucination. It’s the fumes.
She texts back five minutes later, assuring him that John is fine. Sherlock straightens, gives himself a mental scolding and hops in the shower.
It doesn’t stop the dreams. John seemingly asleep on the sofa next to a depleted syringe of ondansetron and empty bottles of phenobarbital. John on the roof of Bart’s, crashing headfirst into the concrete, his skull bursting on the sidewalk. John stepping off a chair in the kitchen and not falling to the floor, but stopping, stacatto, followed by a minute or two of thrashing, wild, uncontrollable jerks of his limbs that gradually...slacken...and stop.
At first John dies in many ways. But as the months go by, one dream starts repeating. Sherlock mounting the steps to their flat and opening the door to a sickly crime scene smell of blood and viscera. Sherlock tearing up the stairs and throwing open the door and there’s John, his John, propped against the headboard with his gun hand at his side, head wreathed in a spatter pattern like a halo against the wall.
The morning after the eighth time he has the same dream, Mycroft contacts him. Sebastian Moran captured. All is well.
And it’s beautiful. They’re the most beautiful six words in the world, really, because Sherlock isn’t going another week without laying eyes, hands, anything on John Watson just to make sure he’s alive. He’s on a plane in two hours and breaking into Baker Street in four, picking the lock and bounding into their flat.
John is facing the window. There is something in his hand. He turns.
“John,” Sherlock breathes.
They do not move for seven seconds.
When John tries to step towards him, his leg folds under him and he crumples to the floor. Sherlock is by him as fast as he can move, and that’s marvelous. Really, truly splendid, as a matter of fact.
And the gun slips from John’s fingers.