Chapter Text
Dear Mary,
I once told John that your life is a debt I will never know how to repay. And Mary, I think I have failed you. You told me that if he thought I needed him, he would be there. And he always is. But that's exactly the problem. I cannot bear to hurt my Watson, and to show him the depths of my pain would be to cause irreparable damage to the man who deserves the entire world.
You said that John isn't a saint. He knew exactly what he was choosing when he chose me and you. I once told him I wasn't an angel, but I was on the side of them. You were wrong, that he wasn't a saint. He is the angel. For him to care about me through everything I have said and done, through this cold, hard, unlikeable shell - it does take a saint. Or a soldier. Or an angel. Maybe they can all coexist.
So when he screamed at me after you died, when he said it was my fault, I believed him. I still do. The universe should have chosen you, Mary. I am not deserving of this "gift" people call life. Especially when I will never again be completely salvageable in his eyes. That's what matters to me--what his eyes see of me. That is the only gift I experience everyday.
Which is why I cannot tell him this. Every morning, I wake up disappointed to see another day. I cannot kill myself. I cannot do that to John (again, sort of). But I am riddled daily with the feeling of dread, and doom, and nothingness and everythingness--these feelings confuse me, Mary. They make me doubt my mind. I know what I'm supposed to do to get through the day: wake up, eat something, solve crimes, shower and go to bed and do it all again the next day.
But it's not that easy, and it doesn't make any logical sense. My body is functioning as good as it ever has. My mind moves quickly and solves puzzles with the same haste it always has. But I, the "identity" of me, I suppose, feels stuck in tar. I feel as though I am staring down from the building I jumped off of, all the time, every second of every day. It calls to me. An end. Any end.
How much longer must I go through these motions, trapped in my body, my mind stuck inside a human soul? How much longer must I suffer, Mary?
I would suffer for eternity if it would protect our John. But I'm getting tired. And this kind of tired is harder than bored.
Yours,
SH.