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A dark coat lightly billowing in the wind. A slender figure, dark against a livid sky, standing unmoving on the roof.
He can still hear his last words, a goodbye that rang too abrupt and final. Too painful. Because then for the first time he had heard a note of regret in his voice, composed yet tinged with urgency and anguish.
He can still see him with his arms outstretched. He can still see him falling. Over and over again, whenever he manages to get a few hours of troubled – tortured would be a rather more accurate description – sleep. The nightmares he used to have before he came into his life now look like harmless and insipid fragments of a long-forgotten past.
He can never see him on the ground, though. With his dark curls and pale skin streaked with blood. The same blood that stains the pavement, as a somewhat obscene and crude reminder of human mortality. Every time he wakes up, his heart racing madly in his chest, nausea choking him. Every time he sits up, shivering, with his eyes wet and the brutal certainty that it wasn’t just a bad dream.
This is his reality now. Something he cannot adjust to. Not when he, locked up in his cramped bedsit, thinks back to the days in Baker Street, with bullet holes in the wall, body parts in the fridge, the thrill and excitement of investigation, sometimes the music of a violin and…and then he can bear to think no more.
Time passes, but the pain does not go away. Not after a month, not after a whole year. It changes, it takes many different forms, but it doesn’t go away.
Sometimes when he goes out he happens to notice discoloured writing in yellow spray paint, left by someone who didn’t believe the load of rubbish and lies the papers piled up about him. And then John wonders, he really would like to know where those people are hiding and why they keep leaving, in his path, those words that are a blessing and a curse.
And sometimes he is aware of fleeting glances coming from complete strangers, homeless youths who keep their eyes on him a little too long. At times he even starts thinking that he’s being followed, because even by London’s standards, he happens to have too many strange people around wherever he goes. He feels watched, and he can’t understand why.
And then he thinks maybe he’s becoming delusional; as a doctor, he knows only too well how those things work – pain, loss and shock can turn a perfectly healthy and functional individual into a lunatic who sees ghosts. And he thinks that’s exactly what is happening to him. Because sometimes he’s sure he knows who is watching him, sometimes for a split-second he can see him reflected in the windows of shops and cabs, sometimes he turns around and he is sure a slender figure in a dark and overdramatic coat was just behind him, swift and silent, like only memories – or ghosts – can be.