Title: Reality
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Rating: Teen
Length: 500ish words
Spoiler: through Reichenbach (end of season 2)
Content notes: Reference to a canonical death.
Author notes: Dear brain, please can I write something for f_f other than angsty Sherlock stuff? Please? Like, maybe fluffy Sherlock, or angsty otherfandom, or fluffy otherfandom, or something? Sigh.
Summary: What his therapist calls PTSD, John calls his best friend.

#

His therapist calls it PTSD. "It's very understandable," she says; "given how disconnected you were feeling, how lonely you admit to being, it makes sense that you would invent someone who not only accepts you, but understands you better than you understand yourself."

John clamps his mouth shut and stares out the window, because he's tired of insisting that Sherlock is real.

It's getting more and more difficult to argue what he knows to be true. No one admits to remembering someone by the name of Sherlock Holmes. There's nothing in the media, nothing from any of the people that John and Sherlock spent time with, nothing except John's own very vivid memories.

Once, he tries asking her why -- if, as she insists, Sherlock were a product of his mind -- he would put himself through the agony of Sherlock's death. It takes him several tries to get the words out, because even still, talking about it feels like carving chunks of his own flesh out with a dull knife, but he has to know what she says.

She considers that for a while, and then suggests that perhaps it is a sign that he's ready to move on. To heal.

John closes his eyes and says nothing.

#

There is a moment when he begins to doubt himself. The telly is on in the background, and they're interviewing some actor who's promoting a new movie, and John glances at the screen and freezes because it's Sherlock.

It's not Sherlock.

He looks just like him, the same face and the same body type, the same eyes and the same quick smile. But there's something subtly off about hm; he lacks the manic intensity, the arrogance, the superhuman intellect that made Sherlock impossible to live with and yet impossible to live without.

John turns the telly off so he doesn't have to see it any more.

#

"If he's not real," he asks his therapist haltingly, "if he's all in my head, why can't I get him back?"

"Perhaps you don't need him," she suggests gently.

"I do!"

"It's not a conscious choice. Your mind created a defense that you no longer require. The loss you feel is very real, but it is the pain of growth, of healing, of getting better."

John doesn't want to be better. He wants Sherlock back. But he's learned not to say that to her.

#

About two weeks after he stops going to see his therapist, he meets Sherlock.

He doesn't seem to remember ever having met John -- it's a little like deja vu, restarting a friendship from the ground up -- but he's very definitely Sherlock. For half a moment John can hear his therapist's voice telling him this isn't real either.

But John doesn't particularly care. He'll take an imaginary Sherlock over no Sherlock at all, if that's the choice.

And this time around, he resolves, he's not going to let anyone, especially his own brain, get Sherlock anywhere near the top of tall buildings.

This time around, he's going to do everything right.

Reality's boring.

Sherlock is not.