This is really amazing. It's exactly what I wanted in a post-Reichenbach fic. You've really cut to the heart of the characters here with some brilliant writing.
John moves the boundaries of himself for other people. He accommodates; arranges himself around them. Unobtrusive, until one morning they wake up and realise the impossibility of living in a world without him.
And this:
He’s unaccustomed to it, this feeling of watching his friends—if he can still call them such—as an outsider looking in. In his absence, it seems, they’ve banded together, formed an odd fellowship of loss from which he—the lost one—is excluded.
I feel most keenly for John, and always will, but I was able to feel for Sherlock too. He seems almost ashamed of what he has to do to John in order to get what he needs... and Mycroft's parting thoughts are spot on. Really well done!
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John moves the boundaries of himself for other people. He accommodates; arranges himself around them. Unobtrusive, until one morning they wake up and realise the impossibility of living in a world without him.
And this:
He’s unaccustomed to it, this feeling of watching his friends—if he can still call them such—as an outsider looking in. In his absence, it seems, they’ve banded together, formed an odd fellowship of loss from which he—the lost one—is excluded.
I feel most keenly for John, and always will, but I was able to feel for Sherlock too. He seems almost ashamed of what he has to do to John in order to get what he needs... and Mycroft's parting thoughts are spot on. Really well done!