Leviticus 20:13

The Details Are Beginning To Fade

John POV: John had bought two bouquets of flowers that afternoon. After work he had gone straight to the florist and chosen the most beautiful arrangements of flowers that he could find, using up a good portion of his paycheck to buy beautiful selections of roses for Sherlock and another bouquet of bright yellow daffodils with some white daisies and white baby's breath for Rosie, to put on her grave. John had realized this morning that he hadn't been to see his daughter since he had buried her; in fact he hadn't even gotten a chance to see the coffin placed in the ground at all. After such a whirlwind of occurrences his mind had only been trained on one person right now, and yet he made a point to go directly to her grave once he bought her a bouquet he suspected she would enjoy. It felt rather odd to be buying Rosie flowers again, considering he had stopped in here almost every other day when she was in the hospital to try to cheer her up a little bit. The florist asked how she was doing and it took John a moment to get the words out, realizing with trouble that despite the memories this shop might hold of her illness Rosie really was gone, and she wasn't coming back. Who knew how long it was going to take John to see her again, how long he would have to wait for that final breath? The trouble was, John didn't know whether or not he wanted to see Rosie soon, he didn't know whether or not he could leave Sherlock and the life he was just starting to build. That was morbid of course, and certainly not something a good father would qualm about, but how was he supposed to know where he was going to end up? After being in such a relationship with a devout priest he knew that his chances of getting to the pearly gates were slim, and of course Rosie would have no reason to end up in the fires. If he went to Hell then there would be no chance of seeing Rosie at all, if there even was an afterlife! How stupid would he feel if he intentionally followed Rosie to the afterlife only to find that it was nothing but nothing? So no, he wasn't about to jump of a bridge in hopes that he would be able to see his daughter once more, he was staying here, with two feet on the ground and two bouquets in his hands. John drove to the gravesite with his windows rolled down despite the cold, his radio turned off so that he could hear nothing but the wind rushing past his freezing pink face. He felt the need to pull himself back into reality in the only way he knew how, and yet even his senses were starting to fail him as his now irritated skin began to go numb. The graveyard was silent, as he had predicted, with nothing but the sound of the wind blowing the bare trees this way and that, their branches crackling as they shook and clattered about. A crow was cawing from somewhere in the grey forest, and yet John didn't feel the need to search for it, it was almost as if its presence was necessary, to fill the silence with the most eerie sound, with the loneliest sound. John parked the car next to where Rosie's gravestone glittered in the sunlight, the newest and shiniest stone in the whole cemetery. He had done a surprisingly good job at picking out her gravestone, it was pink tinted marble, nothing more than a simple square in the dirt and yet it radiated a feeling he simply couldn't understand, a feeling unprecedented sadness as he realized what that magnificent stone represented. It sat there in the grass only to emphasize all the other things in Rosie's life that he was missing, simply by having the privilege of seeing it radiating the beams of sunlight. John would never get to see Rosie's high school diploma, he was never even going to see her name on a list for kindergarten registration. He was never going to meet her classmates, or her potential friends, or her first boyfriend (or even girlfriend, who knows?), he was never going to meet her first teacher. He was never going to help her pick her college, and he was never going to teach her to drive. She would never live to cast her first ballot or drink her first glass of wine, she was never going to get married or have children of her own. She was going to die, she had died, something that should be the end of the road ended up being the mere beginning for her. A father should never have to see their daughter's gravestone and yet there it sat, and here was John, feeling his eyes begin to well up with tears as he began to realize just what he had missed by letting her slip through his fingers. John almost didn't get out of the car. The more he realized that he was here to lament his daughter's death the more he wanted to pretend it had never happened at all. It was a lot easier for John to forget than it was to accept, and despite the bundle of flowers he now clutched in his hand and the stone that shone right outside of his window, he was already starting to tell himself that it was okay to drive away. And yet he couldn't, god how dare he even consider leaving his daughter? Rosie had stood by him for as long as she lived, and here he was telling himself that it was alright to just leave her behind! Without time to think John threw open the car door, falling onto the grass with the flowers clutched weakly in his hand. He didn't bother locking his doors; in fact he didn't even bother closing them before he walked slowly over to where Rosie's gravestone sat proudly in the overgrown grass. There she sat, below his two feet her corpse was already rotting away, her smile disintegrating and her skin molting and leathering against her bones...he didn't want to think about that, the morbidity of it all and the drastic difference there was between his daughter now and his daughter the last time he had seen her alive was probably too emotionally taxing to even imagine, and so he blocked it out of his mind completely, shaking his head and forcing a smile onto his face.
"Rosie you're um...well hello, for starters." John muttered weakly, talking to the gravestone as if he actually expected his daughter to be listening. It was rather odd to be having a one way conversation, however this way he knew that he would never be interrupted. If John concentrated hard enough he could actually envision the smile she used to give him when he first walked into her darkened hospital room, that beam of light that radiated not from the lightbulbs but from her face, making him believe momentarily that her mere presence would make everything alright again. That smile now existed only in his memory, and even now the details were beginning to fade. John remembered the smile and not the emotion, he saw the light but didn't feel the warmth in his heart, he saw his daughter, and yet he was painstakingly aware that he was still standing atop her grave.
"I brought you some flowers, a little of everything I guess." John said with a shrug, kneeling down to place the flowers at the edge of the stone and sitting back in the very short grass to smile at it how the flowers complimented the pink tint of the grave. It was beautiful, really, and yet he couldn't help but feel a pain in his heart, realizing that for the most part he would be the only one to really appreciate it.
"I wanted to tell you Rosie, that I um...I took your advice. Or at least I think it was advice, I really can't tell. But I know you were thinking along the same lines as I was about um...about Sherlock. You told me in your own way that we should be together, that I had fallen in love, and at the time I had been too distracted to appreciate it but you were right. Well you're always right of course, you're incredibly perceptive for a girl your age and you were right. I did love him, I do, I do love him and now we're together." John admitted with a bit of a shy smile, looking for a moment down at his feet from where they were crossed on the freshly planted grass. No one was listening any yet he felt flattered just to say those words, Rosie had been the first person he had been able to tell, the only person that wouldn't do anything about it, the only person he really had to tell. However he wasn't able to see her reaction, he could only hope that she was smiling down at him from Heaven.
"I know it's weird, to be in love with a priest, but it does happen! I assume it happens, we just don't know about it because they keep it all hush hush, I suppose Catholics don't really like to admit that even their most loyal members are still ever so willing to linger along the lines of relationships. But they've got hearts Rosie, just like you said, and now I'm not alone. Not anymore." John assured finally, pursing his lips and nodding his head very slowly, hoping that she could appreciate what he had come to say. This was all her doing, very indirectly her sickness and her death had been the things that had drawn Sherlock and John closer together, and as horrible as it was to ever feel thankful for such an unfortunate occurrence, well, there had proved to be a ray of sunshine in this mess of dark clouds after all.
"Anyway, how have you been?" John wondered quickly, letting his sentence hang in the air and trying to imagine how Rosie might respond. For the most part she would describe Heaven and the people around her, probably about how she was finally meeting her great-grandparents (John only hoped she would recognize them) and maybe she would get a reunion with her hamster, who had died in a very unfortunate vacuuming accident (as far as Rosie was concerned, however, it had run away). Rosie had probably met God by now, the very man John was trying to keep as far away from as he could at the moment; however Rosie was probably having a pretty good time asking him how he lived so long and how he shaved his immortal but rather neatly kept beard. She was always asking funny things like that. And maybe she had even met some angels, and sang in their little angel choir while wearing a neat little white robe, or playing those obnoxious horns that seem to have no keys however they supposedly play the most beautiful music. Did Rosie have wings? Did angels even fly? Did they even sing? Or were they like the Bible described them, fierce warriors clad in heavenly armor, strutting around with large swords stained in the black blood of the devils who try to taint their kingdom? Was Rosie training to be an archangel? That would be pretty cool. John wished that he could answer all of these questions; however he knew that the answers lay purely in his imagination. If he ever wanted to know for sure then he would have to sacrifice his happiness now for his happiness later, and he certainly couldn't do that, at least not now. Was it worth it, to go to Hell for love? If Heaven was all that he had imagined then what would Hell prove to be like? John imagined Hell to be something like a bonfire, just a thousand times more massive, bubbling and smoking in the crust of the earth. The ground would be ash strewn and smoldering, with fires popping up wherever they pleased and roasting whoever might be closest. And there would be ruptures, like fault lines in the earth except they would house the largest of the fires, and if you fell in you would be burned beyond recognition. And the air would be thick with smoke and ash, coating everyone's lungs and making them cough and struggle, their mouths constantly dry and their throats struggling to get a mere breath of fresh air. And everyone would have a spit, like a pig roaster or something, that they would be tied to. And slowly their own personal demons would rotate them over fires, or dip them in lava, or cut into them with large knives just for the fun of hearing them scream. It would be pain beyond belief, and the Devil would preside in his large obsidian castle and throw darts a crude drawing of Jesus or something like that. John didn't want to go to Hell, he knew that for a fact, however sometimes sacrifices had to be made, eternal sacrifices that is, for something that seems to worthwhile. Burning on a stake might just be worth it if Sherlock was burning on a stake next to him. And the pearly white gates of Heaven, with its clean air and its angelic horns, well they would remain closed, merely as a reminder of what could've been for all the occupants of Hell.