John is convinced, when he thinks about it later, that he was hallucinating.
It's because he's in pain, he reminds himself, because of the bullet that's ripped through his shoulder and the pain that's more excruciating than anything he could have imagined. He tries to reach up with his other hand, to turn to see just how bad it is, but every movement of his aching muscles sends another scream of agony through his body, and eventually he gives up. It's only temporary, he thinks, as the sun burns and the darkness begins to creep into his vision. He just needs a moment to rest until he can find the strength to move, to wait for help or try to help himself...
It's some time after he closes his eyes- or maybe no time at all- that he feels something soft brush against the side of his face. He frowns and tries to place the feeling but he can't. It feels cool against the heat of the sun, and he tries to lean into it slightly, searching for anything that'll distract him from the agony in his shoulder, the grit of sand under his eyelids, the bleeding cracks in his lips, his next rattling breath. It takes him a moment to realize that he's not just on the ground anymore, another for him to force his eyes open.
It's a man. The man has dark, curled hair and lighter eyes and behind him stretches something white that John assumes is somehow just blinding sunlight.
But the light moves and curls, and John realizes that the light is a wing, and the thing brushing against his cheek is a feather and that the man is not a man at all.
John wants to ask if he's dead, but his mouth is too dry to form the words. His tongue is swollen in his mouth and his lips are bleeding, and air burns in his throat like flames.
But the man looks at him and through the haze that's starting to return, John thinks only of sleeping, and the last thing he sees is the gentleness in those eyes cold gray eyes.
—-
Being discharged isn't easy. After working so hard for years to get to where he is, he's horrified. Furious. Hurt.
One day he accidentally flips over his tray of food. He stares at the spilled milk and the mess of potatoes and rhubarb, and he suddenly doesn't have the energy left to pretend.
The stand goes first, and then the bedside table is turned over. He pushes the bed a few times and throws the tray at the window and the glass cracks, and he's just getting started on ripping the TV down when his shoulder twinges and they find him and pin him down.
John thinks, behind the nurses's grim faces, that he sees that same pale, dark-haired man watching him.
The man shakes his head and John calms.
He sleeps.
—
John spends a lot of time after that sleeping just to get away from the life he suddenly doesn't want to live anymore.
The pain in his shoulder fades, but suddenly he needs a cane to walk, and he's not the John Watson he knew half a lifetime ago.
They send him home. He almost doesn't want to see home again, and for a moment he misses the scorching sun and the sand, the sweat and the blood and the adrenaline- and then he takes in the laughably ordinary city landscape and throws himself back into London with a sort of desperate fervour. He rents a flat that he can just barely afford and sets about trying to forget what he's seen.
It doesn't work, and neither does the blog, and soon he hates the small click and push of his cane and his limp and the nightmares that are never any different and the worry that eventually his money is going to run out and so are his options, but then there is that constant reminder that the gun still remains in his top drawer when everything falls apart.
The only good thing about the nightmares is the angel that he knows now was never real. It's the only reason why he never wants to let go of the nightmares. If he loses the angel, he doesn't want to think about whatever else he'll lose.
—-
John is glad later that he forced himself out of his flat and made himself go out for walks every morning, because just as he's contemplating throwing his cane in the pond and following after it, he hears a voice behind him calling his name.
Mike. John had forgotten anyone else existed outside of the bubble he's put himself in.
Mike talks about a man. He's always at the hospital, Mike says, always working on something unusual at the lab or the morgue. John pretends that he's interested, but for the most part, he wants to be left alone. Alone is easier to handle. Alone protects him.
"Who is he, exactly?" John asks when they get to the hosptial, but either Mike isn't listening or John's beginning to talk too softly because he doesn't answer. But as they push through the doors, there is a voice on the other side, low and quick and strangely familiar. John somehow remembers it, even though he's sure he's never heard it anywhere before, and he's worried all over again until he looks up at the same time as the man on the other side of the room.
Their eyes meet, and John is sure he can hear his own heartbeat in the silence that follows.
He waits for an excruciatingly long second, but he blinks and the moment is over, and the man is disappearing through the door with the warmth of his hand still on John's palm.
He's always like that, John hears, and he shifts uncomfortably on his feet.
It's not his angel, John reminds himself, the angel was never real.
—-
He never really forgets. Sometimes, when they exchange a look, or the man (Sherlock) holds his gaze, John will remember those same eyes from not so long ago, and he'll suddenly lapse into silence because John swears Sherlock knows and that's why-
But not once does Sherlock mention it, so John refuses to talk about it.
The angel is gone from his nightmares, John notices, but he doesn't panic like he thought he would; he always wakes up to the sound of the violin downstairs, and John remembers the angel in the gentle wave of notes that send him back into calm, dreamless sleep.
—-
But there is that day on the roof, when the sun frames his figure and the light seems to move behind Sherlock's back like it did back then, and as John reaches out, he thinks he sees a white line form, starting at Sherlock's shoulders and extending-
But Sherlock falls as John cries out, and the only wings are the ends of his jacket fluttering in the wind, and John hears the sick crunch of Sherlock's bones before he starts running.
Later, as he's staring back at his dead eyes in the black marble of Sherlock's headstone, John remembers.
It's not his angel, he reminds himself.
The angel was never real.
