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Ella was the only person he could bear to talk to about it, and that was only because she hadn't known him and she was too professional to admit to any knowledge of the whole bloody situation. "You watch telly?" he'd asked her, incredulous, and she neatly deflected him because it wasn't important what the doctor thought, only the patient.
John went to the grave a lot. It felt weird, but Ella said it was normal and healthy.
"You have to accept he's gone," she told him.
He huffed out a bitter half-laugh. "I was bloody there, I saw him- of course I accept it."
"She's right though," John told the gravestone later. "I keep waiting for you to turn up and tell me how you did it. I can't imagine how, but if anyone could pull it off it would be you."
"Have you talked to Greg lately?" Ella asked at every session, swapping in a new name each time: Mike, Molly, Mrs. Hudson. "It makes it worse when you shut yourself off from everyone who knew him, don't you think?"
"I don't want their pity," John said bitterly. None of them cast aspersions on Sherlock to his face, but he could see them all thinking it. Poor, poor, deluded John. Look what Sherlock did to him.
She never asked him if he talked to Mycroft. The first time he showed up outside his bedsit, umbrella in hand, John just said "no" and kept walking.
"I'm sort of glad you never found out about that," John told the gravestone. "You like to pretend you don't have any emotions but you could be hurt. Mycroft betraying you, that would hurt."
He got his tenses mixed up a lot, talking to Sherlock.
"When my parents died, I had just enlisted," John said, staring past Ella, out the window at the oak tree opposite. "I lost people in the war, obviously, but it was...different. You kept going."
"You said you saw two of your close friends killed," Ella said. He did say that, in a moment of weakness. Damn therapists and their notes, that was nearly two years ago.
"I was sent home after that," John said slowly. "I had other things on my mind. And then- I met Sherlock."
"It's different, isn't it," Ella said, establishing eye contact by force of will. "When you have to face it every day; the hole where he used to be."
John could only hold her gaze a second before he dropped his eyes to his lap. "Very."
Moving out of Baker Street was a desperate act of self-defense; he couldn't cope with the way every sound made him jerk round, expecting to see Sherlock. But it wasn't nearly enough. John sometimes wished he could walk London blindfolded, because it was impossible to see the city and not think of his friend.
"Taxis are the least of it," he told the gravestone. "I can't even take the tube anymore, I keep picturing you with that harpoon, the looks you must have gotten."
"How's the job search going?" Ella asked at one point.
"Everyone wants to know about the two-year gap in my CV," John said.
"When you were helping Sherlock full time?"
John nodded.
"Do you ever tell them?"
"Once," John said, but he didn't elaborate until later, alone with the grave, sitting with his arms wrapped round his knees. "He said, 'Didn't it turn out he was a fraud?'" John's voice cracked on the last word, and he furiously dashed tears from his eyes with his left sleeve. "I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hit him so much, I couldn't even speak. I just got up and walked out."
He could see the look Sherlock would have given him at that- surprised and a little pleased, the way he always got when John defended him to his numerous detractors.
"You think I should believe it," John said to Ella accusingly. "All that- all that absolute fucking shit they're saying about him. You think I'm in denial." He usually didn't swear in front of her, but she didn't seem surprised.
"I think you loved him," she said. "You trusted him, and he lied to you." She held her hands folded over her knees; she left the notebook closed with the pen on top. He always talked more when she wasn't playing stenographer.
"He didn't," John insisted. "Sherlock was a genius. And there was a Moriarty, there was."
"That's not what I meant, and you know it," Ella said.
"The first day we met, Donovan said you were dangerous," he said to the gravestone. "You told me you were a sociopath. I didn't believe it when I barely knew you- do you really think you can convince me at this point?"
"It's not normal, nothing about this is normal!" John shouted at Ella one day. She didn't so much as flinch.
"Grief makes you feel more, more intensely," she said. "So yes, pretty much everything you might possibly feel is normal."
"What if I told you I wished I had died with him?" John demanded. "That I wish Moriarty had killed us at the pool, we'd all gone up together?" Ella shook her head. "What if I told you I think about it all the time?" He knew he was playing with fire, that he could be sectioned if she thought he was an imminent danger to himself or others, but he found it hard to care.
She seemed to take it calmly enough. "How often do you think about it?" she asked. "Have you actually planned it out, your death?" She's asking if he's just morbid, or if he's actually displaying suicidal ideation; he's not an idiot.
"No," he admitted in a mutter, dropping his eyes.
He told the gravestone, "Maybe if I made my death as meaningless as yours, that would show you. You fucking wanker." That's not quite the truth either, though.
He did hide the gun at Baker Street when he left. He was afraid that if he picked it up, it might not be himself that he turned it on.