Work Text:
I’ve wandered into countless rooms to find him standing there. I’ve felt him in my bed at night when it’s too dark to see. I’ve walked about in sharp sunlight casting a shadow that isn’t my own. A shadow of someone with the grace of movement reserved for those who can’t leave footprints, someone who no longer exists.
But this is different. This isn’t that companion. This man is gaunt, hair shorn, eyes frightened. His skin is stretched too tightly over his bones, no hint of the immaculate flesh and subtle curves of my memory. My mind has humored me for three years, I know this, just as I know the vision before me is not a device created by my psyche to save me from annihilation. This is no desperate apparition of John’s Sherlock. It is Sherlock. Older, thinner, sick and weary. Alive. Alive and looking like I never would have, never could have, imagined him.
Time had somehow managed to rebuild me back into a singular creature, though the fit of my pieces was not so tight as before; before the shifting looseness created by one missing, irreplaceable part. But now I feel what’s left of me crumbling into dust. Because my cells, my atoms, the integrity of my body which somehow survived his absence, cannot endure this betrayal.