Let The Shadows Win

Future After Fatalities

            John POV: Remember now, that John was happy. Remember now that he was content. He might not remember it in the end; in fact it's guaranteed that he won't. Yet there are reasons that people get separated, reasons that people get taken away. Relationships that aren't meant to be are separated not by a cruel act of nature, but a necessary intervention of fate. John couldn't understand that, how could he? The removal of Sherlock Holmes out of his life was as if someone had removed one of his limbs, even if it served him no purpose but to smack himself in the face at repeated intervals. Yet it was still a part of himself, a necessary part, and he could never grasp the idea that maybe having such a thing wasn't necessary, or even wasn't healthy! And yet in time he did get over it, in time he recovered from his missing part, he recovered from the attempt on his life. The wound turned to a scar, and the reality he had been living for what felt like years instead turned into a distant memory. Of lovers long gone, of murderers since arrested, and of the dead finally getting the justice they deserved. And once all of that was wiped from his mind, once he was able to forget about his past and instead focus on his future...I swear he was happy. A simple life, with a simple woman from so long ago. Mary Morstan had been his crush from day one, a woman who had been on his mind for as long as John had lived. Since preschool he had been in love with her, and it feels like ever since then (ignoring the little hiccup that occurred when he fell into Sherlock's clutches) she had taken permanent residence in his heart. And so when she finally began to pay attention to him, when they were in college together without ever knowing it until sophomore year, well that was when things began to get interesting. At first, John refused to love her back. He was still tangled in thoughts he couldn't control, and the strangest of all desires to go running to the psychiatric ward of the state prison to try to find the man he had dedicated the whole of his heart to. And yet Mary was patient, most likely because she didn't yet realize what a man she was trying to court. For some reason she knew nothing of Sherlock Holmes, and whether this be because the town attempted to cover up their local serial killer (nothing much was in the news, yet that never stopped gossip!) or that she had just been living under a rock for that whole year in which the name Sherlock Holmes was on everyone's lips, well John didn't know. And he didn't complain. For once in his life it was surprisingly nice to have a normal conversation, in which the other person wasn't looking down upon him and constantly asking if he was alright or not. He liked to be treated like a human, he liked to cover the scar on his neck with makeup so that it wasn't visible, and he liked to try to blend into the crowd as if he was just one of them. Mary Morstan allowed him to do such things, she allowed him to be normal. She never asked if he still loved Sherlock, simply because she didn't know he ever had. She never asked him if he was alright, simply because she never had any reason to believe that he wasn't. In Mary Morstan's eyes, John was just like everyone else. And that was exactly why he decided to make her Mary Watson. Domesticity seemed to suit John, up to a point that is. He enjoyed living in a cookie cutter house, living next to neighbors and across from neighbors who had the exact same structure, down to ever last window and shingle. He liked to put a basketball hoop up in the driveway and shoot around by himself. He liked to sit outside on the porch with his wife next to him, counting fireflies until they fell asleep to the chirping of the crickets. He liked to watch the news over a bowl of oatmeal and then head off to work. He liked to bring his daughter to daycare, chatting with the parents while their children mingled about in the hallways. He liked plays, and breakfast in bed, and even paying taxes. Normality fit him like a glove, and to even think that he had ever twisted out of such a world of everyday people and into the clutches of a maniac...well you would never know. Even he sometimes forgot, he forgot until he drove by the same town he had seen for the past thirty years. He forgot until he opened his sock drawer and saw that laminated news article hidden under all of the pairs he had forgotten to wear. He forgot until he walked out of the shower to see the mark of Sherlock's knife, scarred along his windpipe, the very spot in which he could've died. The very spot in which he chose life over love. And then he remembered again, what it was like to be in love with someone who thought love was a binding life contract. Just a boy back then, they had both been far too young to understand properly what love actually was. And yet they contorted their version into something of slavery, until Sherlock had become convinced that the only way to maintain this love was to give up everything else. Sherlock had wanted to keep John to himself, and by doing so kill him. He wanted to kill John so that his ghost stayed forever in his head, where he claimed to be able to see the ghosts of his victims. Where he claimed John could never wander off and fall in love with someone else, a feat that John had considered at the time to be impossible. All the promises he had made back then, about how he would never dare love another person, about how he would break Sherlock out of prison when he got the chance! About how he would wait until Sherlock got released so that they could finally be back together. Well, it had been about thirteen years since Sherlock had been incarcerated, and if the doctors at the prison were at all sane themselves, they would make sure Sherlock stayed for life. At first John had been waiting for Sherlock, at first he couldn't properly understand that he was gone. For years he had to have therapy, mostly because of his mother's recommendations, however partially because of his own willingness. Sherlock's love and presence was like a drug, and his withdrawal symptoms were almost dangerous, considering their intensity. At first John was attempting to keep his promise, he would develop these horrible master plans to get Sherlock out of the imprisonment and rehabilitation that he solely needed. Yet whenever John tried to go to the prison, his mother would stop him. Someone would stop him! And so he never went, and as time went on, and as his attachment to Sherlock slowly faded away, well it seemed more and more unlikely that he ever will. Then came a time when John fully accepted the irrationality of ever seeing Sherlock again. He suddenly understood that to see Sherlock would be to also give up whatever progress he had made in his absence. In the first couple of weeks John had been seeing things that weren't there, visions of his deadly suitor appearing to him in public places, sometimes making him cry out in fright! He would hear the boy's whispering in his ears, wake up in a cold sweat after such a realistic nightmare, sometimes merely recreating what he had already went through! Oh the lengths he had gone, the things he had seen, the things he had done, the things he had narrowly escaped! John was lucky to be alive, considering the people he had been associating with in those days. Mycroft Holmes, who wanted nothing more than to protect his brother from all possible human interaction. He had tried to kill John, or more accurately he had tried to make Sherlock kill John instead. And Sherlock, who would have slit John's throat to ensure his loyalty! To even process that he was still alive now was a feat, for there were times when John still believed he was dead. Where he still thought that in the back of his mind he was comatose somewhere, or even rolling over in his grave while he reminisced about all of the life he had missed after giving into Sherlock's temptations and wild love induced fantasies. There was a part of him that had gotten killed by Mycroft, and a part of him that had allowed itself to be killed by Sherlock. Yet there was a larger part of him that had survived to live another day, another month, another year. The whole of him had made it through, and the whole of him had to manage on its own now. And so he made a new life, one away from the memories, one away from the scars of the life he had inflicted upon himself. And his new life was wonderful, completely wonderful! Wonderful in a way he couldn't imagine, and more desperately...wonderful in a way he would never remember.
"John honey, could you help Rosie set the table for dinner?" Mary called from the kitchen, standing at the stove and stirring up the pasta sauce in a large pan. She was wearing her polka-dotted apron, the very one that John had gotten her for her birthday about eight years ago. She had always loved to cook, and she had always had a passion for fashion. Therefore he did his best to intermingle those two traits, and out of the wrapping paper came a wonderful apron! He was almost surprised she wore such a thing, for in the end it was an atrocious piece of fabric that was tied around her waist. However Mary liked it, in fact she wore it every day when she was making the family their food. John had questioned her dedication to the thing many times, yet all he could gather from her responses was that even though she fully acknowledged the horror of the print and the fabric, she wore it because he had given it to her. She wore it because she knew it meant something to John to see her using it.
"Ya alright. ROSIE, DINNER!" John called loudly throughout the house, in hopes that his voice would project up the stairs and into Rosie's bedroom. She was only four years old, not yet old enough for school yet old enough to at least do some tasks around the house. John was eagerly awaiting the time when she was old enough to actually pull her weight and do the chores that no one else wanted to have to do. Like taking out the trash, or pulling up the weeds from the garden, or scrubbing the toilets. Of course Mary reminded John that it would be unfair to give Rosie all of those horrendous chores, however John presumed that it was only fair given how many hours of sleep he had lost and how many diapers he had to change when raising her.
"Well I could've yelled for her like that! Come on John, get up off the couch." Mary insisted with a scolding sort of tone, the sort of tone a mother would use with her child when they weren't putting a good enough foot forward. John sighed heavily, however it was all he could do but nod and get to his feet with some struggle. The football game was on, and after having been brainwashed by suburbia he had picked a team to cheer for, in turn giving up very much of his time just staring a screen and watching men throw some balls around and get pummeled. Nevertheless John understood that getting Rosie up was more important than watching every last second of the game, and so he struggled away from the screen and went up to find Rosie. As he had predicted she was in her room, playing with her dolls without a care in the world. At the moment she was raising them high above her head, sitting up on the bed so that the drop down to the floor seemed fatal for such a toy of that size. She looked thrilled to put the doll in such a perilous situation, for she had her Ken doll rushing around at the edge of the bed with his arms bent outwards, as if he was going to try to catch her. John tried to smile, for he should probably appreciate his daughter using her imagination to play instead of just staring at a phone like all the rest of the kids her age. However it was rather terrifying to be in the face of something so real, and so familiar. A life in peril, while their lover could do more than struggle to do the impossible. John rather felt as though he was both dolls at once, trying to save Sherlock from himself all while trying to avoid Sherlock's method of saving him. It was all too real, it was all too familiar. John blinked widely, watching as Rosie dropped her Barbie to the ground with a celebration shout, making Ken stoop over in agony to see his love now dead on the carpet below.
"Rosie, dinner." John muttered, looking at the Barbie doll as she lay innocently and unharmed next to Rosie's bed. He needed to get control of himself; he needed to remind himself that not all tragic love stories were related to his with Sherlock. And besides, how likely was it that his daughter was intentionally flashbacking his innermost emotions? He needed to stop seeing things where there weren't things, he needed to ease back and remember that not everything in life revolved around the one thing that he had left behind.
"Dinner already? But I just got home!" Rosie whined, dropping her Ken doll to join Barbie as she crossed her arms in annoyance.
"Well yes, we always eat dinner after you get home." John reminded her with a laugh. Rosie sighed heavily, however she nodded her head in some distant recollection.
"Will you play with me after dinner?" she asked pleadingly, looking up at John as if trying to beg him to agree. She always loved it when John joined her, probably because he made very funny noises for all of his characters and he would always give the story a happy ending. That was where they differed; Rosie liked to kill off the characters at the end of every story she created, while John couldn't stand the idea of death. He couldn't stand the idea that a story had the potential to end tragically, for he was afraid that his might end that way as well. He didn't want karma to come back and bite him, and this was his way to avoid any sort of irony that might befall him. Besides, who didn't love a happy ending?
"Yes of course, you know I love to play with you." John agreed with a grin.
"Yay! Dinner won't be boring now." She decided confidently, scooting off of her bed and racing down the stairs before John could even have a moment to catch up. Together he and Rosie set the table, and before long Mary had set down a great pasta dinner for them all. She had even added garlic bread, which had almost become a staple in this house. Yet another little thing she did to display how much she cared for her family, and yet another reason John loved her so much. Because she was normal, all of this was normal! Why couldn't it just stay like this forever, why couldn't he just have this life for as long as he lived? Why did anything have to change, why did the past have to resurface? Why did he have to forget? After John and Mary finished the dishes Rosie was already rushing to get her dolls arranged. She had a great big playhouse they had bought her for her third birthday, just a plastic thing that had been converted into her doll's penthouse over the year. She had a great many dolls and even more outfits, and so she liked to make sure her parents knew of their selection and fashion choices. Rosie cared a great deal for her dolls' appearances and wellbeing, and sometimes she would even clean them off with the Windex under the sink if she thought they were getting dirty. She was a good child; she had inherited that from her parents.
"Come on Daddy, you better hurry or Mommy and I are going to get all the good outfits!" Rosie warned, dragging Mary's hand up the staircase in her urgency. John of course knew better than to get the outfits Rosie considered good, especially since she was in a habit of changing them for every scene they played out. And so of course the sparkly blue ball gown was out of the question, as was the yellow crop top, and the striped purple pajamas. Those were all of Rosie's favorite outfits, and if anyone else used them to dress their dolls she always took it as some sort of personal offense.
"Just one moment, I'm going to check the football scores." John insisted, shooing the two of them away even after they had disappeared up the stairs. John turned on the news and stood with the last of his wine in his hands, clicking through the channels to see which station might provide him with the most accurate scores. Yet something instead caught his attention as he was flipping through, a mug shot of some sort, a mug shot of a boy he recognized... With a gasp of recognition the wine glass went falling from John's fingers and onto the hardwood floor beneath his feet, going completely unnoticed by him. Suddenly it was all he could do but allow his mouth to hang open in some sort of crooked gape, watching the mug shot as it sat up above the anchor's right shoulder, barely even listening as the story was spelled out in such bold letters at the bottom of the screen. Local Convict To Be Released. John stumbled back into the couch in a fit of disbelief, and somewhere he might have sworn he had screamed. Somehow his wife had known to come down, for as soon as he fell onto the couch she was coming down the stairs in her frantic sort of way, Rosie peering out from the stairwell as if too afraid to come out and see what had become of her father after his exclamation.
"John what is it? What's going on?" Mary asked frantically, yet just as soon as she got near enough to the TV to see the screen, John turned it off. He didn't want her to see, he didn't want her to know of what a mess his life had been before he was fortunate enough to wed her.
"Nothing, my team...they got pummeled." John lied quickly. He knew that this was a weak response; in fact he knew that this response would do nothing to ease Mary's worries or stifle her fears. She looked just as concerned as ever, yet it was all John could do but pretend to be normal in her spotlight, pretend that the release of the local convict had nothing to do with him whatsoever.
"You're pale." Mary commented. "And trembling."
"I'm fine; I told you that I'm fine. They just lost so badly, and they're trying to get to the playoffs but obviously that's not...that's not going to happen." John muttered, shivering now so violently that he had to pull his knees up to his chest so as to try to cover it up. Yet his teeth were clacking together, and despite his sudden chill there was sweat appearing along his brow, two very sure signs of severe stress that was in no way caused by a football team's upset. He just had to be normal; he couldn't let his mind stray to the mugshot, or to the man that was waiting behind it. Waiting behind those doors that were supposed to confine him, those very doors that were set to be open so soon!
"Why don't you go and lie down?" Mary suggested quietly, patting her husband's shoulder so as to try to calm him down.
"You broke your glass." Rosie's little voice commented, for she was now standing by the edge of the coach and looking upon the great mess that had been made of John's wine glass.
"Don't come over here Rosie; I don't want you to hurt yourself." Mary instructed, getting to her feet so as to go and get the dustpan in the kitchen closet.
"Daddy what's wrong? Are you sick?" Rosie asked nervously, her little voice trembling as she tried and failed to understand the nature of the situation. No one could understand this, no of course they couldn't! John would be the only one in the whole of this little town that could understand what a fear this was. The return of Sherlock Holmes, he was coming back to live among the people, he was coming back so that he could reclaim what he assumed was rightfully his, and what would always be his so long as he was around to claim it. He would come for John...he would come again.