The Inevitable [closed to Kerrigan]

[on_your_nerves]

Good God, he needed a cigarette. Between the world being destroyed and all his friends besides John possibly dying along with it (or the entire thing being a total lie), John punching him and storming off, the talking ponies, the random superhero bringing up his cocaine addiction, and arguing with a space elf over (ugh!) politics and clandestine rebellions...actually, forget one cigarette. He needed a whole carton. Strike that, maybe a truck full.

Reaching into his many coat pockets on an instinctual search for cigarettes he knew weren't there, he found that a pack actually was there. And so was his lighter.

Maybe there was a God. Maybe there was a merciful God, or at the very least, maybe the ship really was as benevolent and merciful as she tried to make herself out to be and decided to smile upon him by snatching up a box of cigarettes with his belongings.

...Probably not, but this at least still was a fine bit of serendipity. Sherlock would take it.

Leaning into the doorway of a building in what he didn't realize was another blind spot in the city, he lit up his first post-end-of-the-universe cigarette and took a long drag from it. To be honest, it wasn't really enough, and like it always did when he least wanted it to, old cravings crawled up in the back of his skull and demanded something stronger.

"Not now."

No, not now, though the way he closed his eyes as he leaned against the door of the building and let out a lungful of smoke, would have made it clear to anyone looking that he was a fair bit more overwhelmed than he could even admit to himself.

It seemed that for now, however, he could be content with causing himself harm with only one cigarette at a time.

Comments

[nerves_of_steel]

"Couldn't help that you were trying to hide from his network while you were taking it apart," John said, unhappy that he couldn't have been doing something to help instead of sitting around feeling miserable. Though he supposed that Sherlock running interference probably explained why Moriarty hadn't come after him with a proper murder attempt. Not that John could have done much, with Sherlock's name disgraced and "Jim Moriarty" having been wiped out in favor of sodding Richard Brook, but Moriarty hadn't gotten to where he was by leaving witnesses behind.

Probably.

He hissed between his teeth at the all-but-admission to Sherlock sleeping outside, then frowned in confusion when Sherlock said that he had help. Were Sherlock literally anyone else, he'd have thought that he was talking about his brother; but Sherlock and Mycroft hadn't gotten along even before Mycroft traded information about Sherlock to Moriarty and then let him loose to wreck havoc on Sherlock's name. So it probably wasn't Mycroft. And it wasn't Mrs. Hudson either, her grief had been perfectly genuine as far as John could tell, and Sherlock probably couldn't risk going anywhere near Baker Street. He went over the short list of people he knew Sherlock knew, but dismissed them all based on their relationships with Sherlock and how they'd reacted to his death.

[on_your_nerves]

"If they'd realized it was me doing it, taking the network apart, they would have followed through and killed you, Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade. Those were Moriarty's standing orders and many arms of his organization weren't even aware of what really happened on the roof of Bart's. They'd never communicated directly with him, after all, and had no idea what he even looked like. He had made sure that his body had been collected from the roof and disposed of so that no one went prodding around the life and death of 'Richard Brook.'"

Of course, the lack of body meant John didn't know he was dead, did he. Sherlock's eyes darted over to John. "He shot himself, you know."

Which had been his most bewildering move of all, but in some ways it wasn't, because of how utterly screwed it had left Sherlock.

"He'd made it so there was no way to undo it all, no way to prove Richard Brook was a lie, no means to find the code to call off the snipers. Maybe if I'd had more time I could have, but even as you stood in front of the hospital, there was a sniper trained on you, lining up his shot. If I hadn't..."

His own imagination in regards to gruesome injuries shut down that line of thought. He could, after all, imagine exactly what John's head would have looked like if it had been hit by the sniper's bullet, how his body would have probably fallen, even what sort of splatter pattern it would have made on the ground.

"Killing himself was the final nail in the coffin, the best way for him to make sure Jim Moriarty ceased to exist and the fiction he created had entirely supplanted the truth."

As he looked at John, the expression on his face was the closest Sherlock's got to sympathetic, the one he made when he understood someone was having emotions, even if he didn't understand the feelings behind them. In his way, he could respect that sometimes, respect hurt, respect pain, respect loss. Like he had on Christmas, with apologizing to Molly, like he had when John had broken up with Sarah and he'd walked out and bought his favorite beer.

It wasn't the same as understanding them and the cause of them completely, but John knew better than anyone else that he wasn't heartless, not entirely.

"I imagine that must have been what was most bewildering to you. If his body had been up there with me, my own motives would have been far more transparent, it would have been obvious that he had some sort of leverage forcing me to jump. I knew he wouldn't leave that evidence after I'd gone, and in the end what was best for you was you believing the fiction. That's why I tried to convince you I was really a fraud and why I made you watch. Truly believing I was dead would have kept you safe, and believing his story would have kept you safer, would have kept you completely out of the cross-hairs while I dismantled his network."

It felt good to finally explain himself. Finally.

"I knew that's what he would have wanted in the end, after all. Moriarty. My death, my life and reputation ruined, and everyone who I'd remotely--everyone I knew believing his lies."

But John hadn't.

[nerves_of_steel]

Moriarty was dead. Killed himself to force Sherlock to jump off the roof. John let that penny rattle around in his brain, knocking trains of thought askew and finally landing on a metaphorical response-trigger.

"Huh," John said. "Well, had I known he was dead, I wouldn't have been quite as convinced that we were."

He'd been torn between grief and unbearable anticipation of the other shoe dropping. At one point, he'd even sent a drunken, swear-filled email to Richard Brook's email address, culminating in the demand that he just get on with it; and then nearly chucked his laptop at the wall at the out-of-office auto-reply.

John took a deep breath and let it out slowly, licking his lips. "There was absolutely nothing you could have said to make me believe that you were a fraud. Nothing. I lived with you for more than a year, I saw you solve cases that you couldn't have set up and put into motion. Hell, I met your brother, and you knew all those things about my sister when we met except that you thought she was my brother." He chuckled bitterly. "Moriarty's story was full of holes if you thought about it, but what did it matter if they did? You were already dead."

[on_your_nerves]

Sherlock's expression in response to that was oddly blank, but more in a way that suggested he didn't know what he was feeling rather than feeling nothing.

The loyalty there, for him, was something he didn't quite understand.

He hadn't understood it with another friend of his eithre.

"You still haven't asked who helped me," he commented mildly. "Unless you've already deduced it."

[nerves_of_steel]

John snorted and made a face. "I've been trying, but haven't had any luck. It wasn't me, obviously, and it wasn't Mycroft, and it definitely wasn't Mrs. Hudson because I don't think she could lie to me like that." He sighed. "I don't know who it could be. But I guess that it'd have to be someone Moriarty wouldn't think to have put a watch on before he met you on the roof."

Right? It sounded right to him. But John had no idea who Sherlock interacted with that he trusted that Moriarty wouldn't have thought of too. That would be why Moriarty had threatened John to ensure Sherlock's behavior rather than the other way around.

[on_your_nerves]

The clue was two words.

"Autopsy report."

[nerves_of_steel]

John blinked a couple times, furrowing his brow and trying to remember if he'd ever actually seen the autopsy report. He really didn't remember a lot from up to about thirty-six hours after Sherlock had jumped.

Autopsy report, autopsy report...

He might need a few more moments to put it together.

[on_your_nerves]

He could tell what John was thinking because he knew how John thought.

"It has nothing to do with what was in it, John. It's that it existed at all."

Who wrote it, John? Who did his autopsy?

"I never realized it, you know," he went on quietly, and there was a touch of something almost mournful in his voice.

He knew she was smitten--he'd used it on occasion to manipulate her into getting what he wanted--but he'd always dismissed her attention as shallow, based on his looks, and mired in the desperation of a young woman almost past her prime who was desperate for a relationship.

How wrong he'd been. How completely, utterly, magnificently wrong he'd been for once.

"I thought you were my first friend," he said, an odd look on his face, "but it appears I was mistaken. I had one, I just...hadn't noticed."

There was a pause.

"It's always something."

Admittedly, missing the fact that Molly Hooper truly, genuinely cared about him was a bit more significant than missing that John's brother was a sister.

[nerves_of_steel]

"Oh, of course!" John said. Of course, Sherlock hadn't really died, but someone had to have filled out a death certificate saying that he had. And it couldn't have been someone high up on the food chain, because the more people that knew that Sherlock wasn't really dead, the more people who could leak the information. And he'd been right outside of Bart's...

"Molly?" He ran a hand over his hair. "But she--"

No, that made sense too -- it made more sense than her actually believing that he'd been a fraud, after all the help she'd been when they'd been running from the police.

...Now he really feels bad for having slammed the door in her face when she'd come to see him after the funeral.

[on_your_nerves]

"She saved my life, John." A pause. "Well, no, I saved my own life with my arrangements, but I wouldn't have been able to do it without her help. She was instrumental to my plans."

[nerves_of_steel]

"I'm sure," John said, shifting his weight and rubbing the back of his neck. "...Did Mycroft know?"

[on_your_nerves]

"Of course not."

That one should have been fairly obvious.

"Do you really think I'd tell him but not you?"

Don't be ridiculous, John.

"Was he miserable? Do tell me he was miserable. I hope he was miserable."

There was quite a bit of bitterness in his voice.

[nerves_of_steel]

"Didn't think so, no," John agreed. That was something of a relief, in a way. While he felt bad for the man for losing his brother -- John had never lost a sibling, especially not a younger one that (possibly?) felt protective of, but he imagined that it'd be terrible. But if Mycroft had gotten to know that Sherlock wasn't dead when it was his fault in the first place that it had happened...

"And I'm sure he was. We've only seen each other once since then, and I wasn't in much of a state to be observant."