like GOD gray was jack’s brother he was the kid jack grew up playing catch with and fighting over the tv remote with and heckling while he was doing homework and kicking and punching and hugging and having the kind of closeness that only siblings have – and then having that ripped away, realizing the absence of his hand in jack’s when they were fleeing for their lives and the singular instinct was to run, the terrible knowledge of not-thereness stretching from seconds of panic to minutes to hours to years and the sinking, awful knowledge that what was happening to him must have been soul-breaking. gray was jack’s responsibility, his little brother, the first person he ever lost and jack’s only link to home – and more than that, even, jack’s only link to a time when he was normal, when he was alive in a way that didn’t feel unnatural and wrong and unreal, when he was a part of the mundane and the ordinary world. he’ll never have that again.
and we don’t think what gray’s reaction to seeing jack again must have done to him, both in the short term and the long – jack lost gray’s love and he lost his trust, he lost gray’s unique dependence on him as a brother, he looked into gray’s eyes and found in them anger and brokenness and resentment for jack, his own blood, who had let go of his hand, however blamelessly, and condemned him to a fate in which his spirit had been snapped and allowed to fester with hate and blame. by that, by the knowing of that, jack lost whatever he had left of his original personness. he lost whatever remained of his ordinariness. that’s got to be a terrible, terrible blow to weather, especially for jack, who must have clung to the hope that somewhere out there in time and space his brother was alive, his brother was alive and happy and normal (please god, jack might have thought in a moment of weakness, let him be normal) and that perhaps gray looked up at the stars and remembered his brother and thought, wherever you are, i hope you’re all right. i forgive you. gray couldn’t forgive him and you can see the degree to which the loss of jack’s last vestige of his home – more than his home, his family and his childhood and his entire could-have-been life – utterly breaks him.
soulmate au where instead of your soulmates first words to you written on your skin it’s their last words you ever hear them say so you don’t know who your soulmate is until you lose them
i have been called satan so many times because of this post
Imagine being in a dangerous setting alongside your soulmate and hearing the last words and realising they’re the last words and calling out to try and warn them – and this warning being the thing that distracts them for just long enough for them to be killed.
Here’s a picture of the crime wall the morning of John’s wedding.
See in the reflection in the mirror? The crime wall is full of stuff. All the careful planning that Sherlock put into John’s wedding.
Now. Here’s a picture of the crime wall at the beginning of HLV.
It’s all gone! The wedding stuff is all gone! Sherlock (or someone else, but I’m guessing Sherlock, Mrs. Hudson knows better than to touch his stuff) took it down at some point in the month between the wedding and HLV.
Wait. Hold on. Think about that for one minute. Let’s think about what happened on the wedding day for Sherlock. He gets ready for the wedding. Goes to the wedding. The wedding plays out….the way that it did. Sherlock leaves the wedding early, because he simply cannot bear being reminded of the fact that he could have had true love, and instead he let it slip through his fingers.
He goes home. Opens the door, relieved that it’s all finally over with, relieved that he can finally escape. And:
Oh.
This is literally what it looked like when Sherlock finally made it home after the wedding. He walks in and is assaulted by the wedding again. This time, with the full knowledge of what exactly it is that he had planned. He planned this. He did this to himself.
At some point, Sherlock had to remove every single one of those scraps of paper, pin by pin. Maybe he did it right then, in the dark. Maybe he did it in the cold light of day, early the next morning, after a sleepless night. It doesn’t really matter, does it. The wedding is over now. It’s done with.
