A/N: I'M BAAAAAACK *slasher smile*. Just FYI, this is set between the mini-episode and The Empty Hearse, and I haven't currently seen the other two episodes so if anything's wrong it's entirely my fault. I watched the mini-ep and all of a sudden I had the overwhelming desire to give him a character study and really see how he got to that point that he did. I don't know if they do more details about that in the other episodes but if not here's my headcanon anyways. XD Enjoy and review if you have the time! ^-^
It was possible, though few people really knew it, for someone to be killed by their guilt. Not actually, physically killed, no, but in every other way guilt could end a man's life as surely as a bullet to the brain. Anderson would freely admit that he hadn't been one of those who knew that before but he surely did now, two years after it happened.
To say that he disliked Sherlock Holmes was to put it very, very mildly indeed. The two were at each other's throats most of the time and the rest of the time they were in different countries. So naturally, he had jumped at the chance to rub the consultant's nose in his own words a little- just a little, mind you. Enough to make Sherlock red in the face instead of him. He'd never know, never would have guessed that it would have led to what it did, and if he had he knew that no matter how much the man got on his nerves he would have run screaming in the opposite direction as soon as Sally came to him that night.
He had been driven by the desire to have petty revenge for some petty insults- and he'd killed a man. Sure, maybe he hadn't pushed Sherlock off the roof but he'd given him an escort up to the ledge and he knew there was no getting around what he'd done. He'd been at home, on his day off when the story aired on the news- 'London Man Commits Suicide After Fraud Accusations'. He'd felt like someone slapped him in the face while he sat there looking blankly at his television.
I did this. It was the first coherent thought to make it through his head and it kept itself on a static loop all day long- the sudden knowledge, the realization that a man was dead because Anderson couldn't resist a chance to 'get back' at him. He'd let himself get driven along and convinced himself that it would all just blow over, that the consulting irritation would be back the next day with some snide remark as always and maybe things would be a little awkward between everybody but they'd work back to normal after a while.
Sherlock's death shattered that nice little illusion he'd made like a football through a window, and that was the exact moment that guilt began to kill Anderson. Dying of guilt was a slow, steady process so smooth and regulated that at first he didn't know it was happening. More and more he began to withdraw from the people he worked with, not going out with them on social occasions like he would and speaking to them less and less outside of the necessary work communication. Everyone at the Yard was divided into three camps on the Sherlock issue- about half were ambivalent, not caring one way or the other for a man they'd only ever heard of. A few made it openly known that they backed up the detective and they made it clear how they felt to him.
Then there was the third group, the ones who thought that he and Sally had been bang on the money and acted like they were the heroes of the police force. Whenever they would overhear Sherlock's supporters giving him a hard time (which he couldn't help but feel he deserved) they would pat him on the back and reassure him that they knew what he'd done was right and that it all worked out in the end. He wanted to scream at them after a while, wanted to yell "can't you tell I never wanted him to die?!" at the top of his lungs. But he didn't. He restrained himself and schooled his face so that no one could tell what he was thinking and crept further away from them by the day, until he didn't speak to any of them at all.
This was when he began to have his first inkling of what he knew now- guilt was as good a murder weapon as anything else in the world. He had known as soon as the story had hit the airwaves that he was as guilty as if he'd given Sherlock a shove from behind so once he knew what was happening there was no way to stop it. He couldn't lie, not even to himself, and say that it wasn't really his fault, that he couldn't have predicted what Sherlock would do and held no accountability for his actions. But that was as much a lie as saying that the ocean was red.
Through his actions- his selfishness and pettiness and downright stupidity- a man had been driven to kill himself. That thought grew within him day by day and tore at his heart and soul until he felt like he had no life left within him. He functioned on for a few months but eventually there came the breaking point, the moment where he just couldn't take it anymore.
Losing his job, the one remaining thing anchoring him to the world and the one thing that he loved to do the most, had been the straw that broke the camel's back. That was when Anderson fully realized what he'd come to know. His guilt had killed him. He had nothing left, no wife- his marriage had shattered long ago, no friends, no passion, and now no job. He was a body without a soul, and inside himself he couldn't help but think that it was his just desserts for doing what he'd done.
The next few months had been the hardest of all, forcing himself through every day while he felt like a pool someone had drained of all its water- without a purpose and more of an impediment than a useful thing. He found himself every temp job that he could and moved into a cheaper apartment than the one he'd been living in, a relic from his married days. He continued existing without actually living and let his beard grow out and his clothes grow old because apart from a small flicker now and then he couldn't bring himself to care about his state.
The only upside to being underemployed on a good day was that he had a lot of time to read the news from everywhere he could find it in a language he could understand. That was how the first story crossed his path, about a blonde drug smuggler being caught hiding in a Buddhist monastery. It had initially caused him no more than a passing tickle of amusement at the thought of a towheaded Englishwoman trying to hide out among a group of bald Asian men but after the second story he went back to it.
It had been a rather audacious claim by an Indian police chief of catching a criminal using the flake from an ice cream cone or something like that, a piece of logic so twisted up and convoluted that his first thought had been that sounds like something Holmes would say. He tried to dismiss the thought but it buzzed around in his head like an irritating fly and he couldn't get it to go away. Through an unfortunate cancellation he'd ended up with a week of free time so he decided to indulge the fly, just because.
Despite what the consulting sod would believe, Anderson wasn't actually a stupid man; he was capable of a fair bit of intelligence and he put it all to use in that week when he tried to tangle out exactly what had happened to Sherlock Holmes. It had been the German that had finally tipped him off. He'd been reading about the murder trial when a small advert running along the side of the website had caught his eye- in English it read something along the lines 'come and see our rich brooks and fields'- some promotional spot for a nature lodge in the Black Forest. He glanced over it at first but suddenly his eyes snapped back and he felt a jolt like he'd stumbled into an electric fence. The name of Rich Brook had engraved itself into his eyelids ever since Sherlock's suicide and that disaster of a case, especially so after he'd been found on the hospital roof dead of acute lead poisoning feet from another man's death scene.
Now he stared at the advertisement with a racing mind and a racing heart, doing the translation in his head. Rich Brook- reichen bach- Reichenbach. For the very first time since Anderson's guilt had begun to kill him he felt a flare of something like pride, mixed with remorse. It had been true, all of it, every single word. Sherlock Holmes had never lied about his cases. Moriarty had been real all along, and Sherlock had known it, he must have. And he must have known that Moriarty wanted to destroy him.
Then a sudden thought stirred the anger that had been dormant in him, covered by his apathy and self-recrimation: Moriarty had wanted to destroy Holmes, and he'd used Anderson and Sally to do it. Anderson had let himself get played as neatly as a violin, tricked into driving a man to suicide and then he'd had his own life deconstructed in the process all because Moriarty couldn't stand the thought of someone smarter than him. It made him want to scream.
But beneath all that a small twinge of hope sparked up, driven by his realization that if Holmes had known Moriarty's game- which he didn't doubt the detective had- he would have found a way around it. He would have found a way to survive. He wouldn't be dead. Anderson knew on a logical level that his idea was completely irrational and that it was, in fact, nothing short of a certifiable delusion but his long dead, deeply dormant hope had sprung back to life and nothing his logical mind said could stop it.
He'd lost everything he had to live for because of the guilt he'd felt over driving a man to suicide and now there was a chance, however long and irrational it may have been, that he actually hadn't. As soon as that little spark of hope had lit up inside his chest his obsession with Sherlock Holmes being alive had filled him up to the brim. It wasn't because he missed the man's company or was secretly friendly toward him, it was because he knew that if he was going to survive it simply had to be the truth.
Now that he had hope that maybe, just maybe, he hadn't actually driven an innocent man to jump off of a roof the idea of him being wrong was unbearable. There was a chance, slight as it seemed, that he didn't need to let his guilt kill him from the inside and he knew that to learn that he was tricked again would be more than he could take. So from that moment on, Anderson staved off his death by guilt and let himself be consumed by the idea that Sherlock Holmes was alive and kicking.
He followed every news story and read every crime article he could find for evidence that Sherlock had been there. He printed them out and memorized them and plotted their locations on a map. He'd gone to Lestrade one night, maybe a little more inebriated than was strictly necessary but the DI had found him at the pub and insisted on taking him home and when he'd been dumped onto the couch Greg saw the map and asked what it was all about. Anderson had poured out the whole story from the very beginning and even in his drunken state he could tell that his former boss didn't believe him.
When he'd sobered up the next day he went back to Lestrade again, trying to convince him, and still the DI had refused to believe it. After the ninth or tenth conversation he'd grown openly frustrated. "Why does it matter so much to you, Anderson?" he'd snapped. "Look, it's not like I want him to be dead either, but he is and there's nothing that can change that." Anderson hadn't responded. He didn't really know how to put it into words, the base desperation that drove him. The need to be innocent of some of his crushing, fatal guilt. To know that he hadn't actually played a part in the ending of an innocent man's life.
So he'd toned down on the hassling, but he hadn't given up entirely on convincing Lestrade. He kept at it, letting the trail suck him in as he tracked every closed case that could have been closed by Sherlock Holmes. They were getting closer and closer, and he said as much to Lestrade at their most recent meeting, while in response the older man had just groaned and sunk his head onto the table with an audible thud.
After Lestrade had left Anderson on his own again the former forensic scientist had found it impossible to be downhearted despite the DI's usual disbelieving reception. He looked at his map, which was now well worn from being opened and shut so many times, and traced the cases along Asia and through Europe and couldn't hold down a smile.
"He's coming home."