Plight of the Good Man

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John stood over the pile of bodies, breathing slowly, his eyes glassy. The stench of rotting flesh didn't register in his nostrils, the heat of the steaming corpses didn't seem to touch his skin. He didn't hear the sound of oozing and dripping blood , nor did the metallic taste in the air reach his tongue.   

He would come.

---

It had started a month ago; his first murder. He hadn't known what else to do. He'd exhausted all of his options, he had no more patience, no more ability to live without Sherlock, no more sanity. It would kill him to do it, but he would die if he didn't. 

It was the only way to get Sherlock back, and he would do anything to get Sherlock back. 

His hand had trembled when he'd shot the first victim. His limp had returned, and his body had sweat, and he hadn't been able to sleep. He'd had tears streaming down his face as the body fell to the ground, a sickening splat that seemed to echo through his entire body, tearing through his every fiber, leaving behind a filth flowing through his veins, coating his bones, seeping through his skin. His jaw was clenched so tightly that he hadn't been able to eat for a day after, for he couldn't open his mouth. He had spent hours lying on the floor of the shower, but the water never got hot enough to truly clean him of what he'd done.

Even still, he couldn't stop. 

By the fifth murder, his hand was steady, and he no longer grasped the handle of the gun so tightly that he thought his fingers might become permanently molded around the plastic. His eyes had been dry, and firmly focused, and he had no aches, no pains, no feeling of disgust rising in his throat along with burning bile. He had been mechanic about it, efficient, and he had walked away without a limp, gone home and eaten a meal, not needed a shower. 

By the eighth murder, he had discarded the gun in favor of his hands.The feeling of his fingers digging in to the soft, delicate necks of his victims filled him with satisfaction. The anger that boiled in him, steamed under the surface, was so easy to release, so easy to direct on the helpless people in his grasp, and he felt a contentedness afterwards that could not be matched. The screams and garbled, desperate moans, the whining pleads for life, filled him with power, with motivation, and he'd finish the job, reveling in the sick snap of their twisted necks, and he'd wiped the spit from the corners of his smiling mouth as he looked down at their lifeless forms.

By the twelfth murder, he'd begun spicing it up a bit. He became quite the swordsman, splitting his victims into pieces as he roared in anger, his mind filled with the image of Sherlock's body falling from the roof of St. Barts. He became an expert at throwing knives as he shook with the memory of Sherlock's body lying on the pavement, blood seeping from his head. He could have been crowned King of beating and drowning and breaking bones in the precise locations that caused the most pain, was the master of swinging an axe and chopping off heads as he felt his muscles screaming with the pain of living without his best friend, of watching him die, of seeing him buried, and of knowing, knowing deep down, that he wasn't dead at all.

The bodies would be the proof. They would bring him back. He knew it. 

He knew it as he piled them up in an empty warehouse, knew it as the headline each week was of all of the missing people whose bodies he arranged one on top of the other, knew it as sure as he knew that the earth went around the sun.

And he was right.

---

He was standing on that pile of bodies, breathing steadily, slowly, oblivious to his surroundings, counting down the moments until he finally felt his presence, heard his deep, rumbling voice from the distance as he walked into view, when he did, and he said,"John."