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John Watson came back from Afghanistan with a wounded shoulder and a shattered psyche and it was Sherlock Holmes that put him back together. He cut himself on the hard planes and angles of Holmes' life, pricked himself with hypodermics and felt shut inside morocco cases. When he caught himself crying out in the night he didn't know if it was nightmares of the war or nightmares of his helplessness. It was never soft. It was never a victory.
When John Watson moved out of Baker Street it was because he was led astray by soft words and soft sighs and the promise of soft curves yielding. He left with a bitter heart that he thought she could heal, and he left without saying goodbye. It felt like defeat, but he told himself it was triumph. He told himself he loved her.
At night when he lay awake listening to her breathing he realized the promises she drew from him were broken before he gave them. He thought he wanted softness and curves, but it turned out he wanted marble and angles.
After Reichenbach he finally knew his heart was gone. He knew this because the ache in his chest was like dying with every breath. But on the whole this was better than soft curves that muffled him. He did not hate her, but he hated what she did to him and what she made of him. At night he dreamed of hard planes, cool beneath his touch, wet with spray from the falls.
When she left him it took him two weeks to notice.
In the stillness of dawn one morning he dreamed he heard another heartbeat twined with his own, dreamed a voice whispering in his ear over and over hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. When he woke, the words were on his lips and his cheeks were wet. He remembered words that he thought he had forgotten, and pieces of conversation he thought he'd lost, and he clutched a pillow to his chest and wept.
That was the day, like fate or destiny or coincidence, that his heart came back to him whole and mostly unscathed. That was the day when he whispered hallelujah with brandy warm in his throat, and hallelujah with slender fingers tight in his own, and hallelujah against warm lips in the darkened bedroom. And later, when Holmes came deep inside him with a strangled cry, he followed just after with a broken hallelujah on his lips.