The idea for this fic (a collection of one-shots) came from a rhyme that a friend told me.
One crow for sorrow
Two crows for joy
Three crows for a girl
Four crows for a boy
Five crows for silver
Six crows for gold
Seven crows for a secret that's never, ever told.
:) Oooooh. Read, review, and enjoy!
One Crow (from Sherlock's POV)
I didn't expect them to mourn.
Well… I expected Mrs. Hudson to mourn me, and I expect that she'd even be happy if I was pocking the wall again with bullets just to know that I was back in 221 B. Mrs. Hudson and I have a unique relationship and I'd even go as far to say that the woman fancies me as an adopted son of sorts. To be completely honest, I rather enjoy that. Some of it is my own maudlin need to be recognised, and god love the woman, she does know how to dote upon me. Did know how. Does know how? How does one refer to oneself when you're technically dead? When you've taken the plunge in front of god and everyone?
Well, not everyone. Just…the one… the one person.
I hadn't really expected that Lestrade would mourn me like he did. After my death I had to wait for a week or two for some falsified paperwork to clear so that I could be on my way to Stockholm (of all places) to begin the search for the other spiders in Moriarty's web. I travelled back and forth between kipping with Mycroft and Molly, the only two people from my life to know that I was alive. Am alive. I'd taken to putting on disguises and observing my…friends and colleagues from respectable distances. Lestrade had been…puzzling. He'd taken a few days off from the Yard and from what I observed spent most of it holed up in his house. He met with John and Mrs Hudson in the evenings for suppers and went out with John on Thursdays for a pint or four. I suppose this might have been some sort of…coping mechanism. I hadn't figured Lestrade as being particularly sentimental toward me.
To be fair, I underestimated the sentiment that these people felt toward me.
Take Sergeant Donovan, for example. After three days holed up at Mycroft's I was antsy and so I dyed my hair and put on a false nose and some glasses and caught up with some of the Yarders at a crime scene. I was standing on the other side of the tape, pretending to be a nosy onlooker when I saw Donovan emerge from the victim's flat. She looked… a bit not good. The circles under her eyes were darker than normal. She had sores on her nostrils from the abrasion of cheap tissues. Every now and again she would cast a glance around the scene as if she were searching for someone in particular. When she didn't find that someone, her eyes would glaze over for the briefest of moments before she'd shake her head and get back to work. What was even more curious was what I overheard when Anderson approached her. She'd told him… "Gods, I miss him! I didn't even like him that much and I thought… I knew he was crazy as a loon. But I didn't expect him to… do that. No one deserves that… not even Sherlock Holmes."
I had to admit that Sherlock Holmes agreed with her.
Molly mourned me even though she knew I was still alive. She mourned me even though I had spent at least a week total sleeping on her couch and drinking tea with her in her kitchen. Molly's mourning was different. She was carrying my secret…the darkest secret. I've always trusted Molly and now I had to trust her even further as she interacted with our friends and colleagues on a daily basis. Molly mourned me for the sake of the others. I have no doubt that her sorrow was real…because Molly can be so terribly sentimental sometimes. Watching our friends in their grief over my death was hard for her because she knew the truth. She knew that she could ease their sadness with just two words and the temptation must have been extraordinary.
Especially when John came to visit.
I figured John would mourn me. He was my best friend and I think it's fair to say that I was his best friend as well. Am his best friend. Do you still get to call yourself someone's friend after you've faked your own death in front of them, even if it was to protect them? At first, I feared that John's PTSD and his memories of watching friends die in Afghanistan would trigger some sort of…collapse in John's psyche. The man is strong and damn it all if he didn't hold himself together very well in the face of danger…but this was different. I'd stepped off a building while he watched me. I don't even think that's something a trained ex-soldier just gets over in a few months, especially one who came back from war already cracked slightly. I feared that my actions might just have pushed John to the brink. But…as I have been many times before, I was wrong about John Watson. There were no tearful outbursts… no dramatic sobbing or anything like that. That wasn't John's way. He was much more subtle than that.
In some cases, that made it worse.
I watched John's mourning from afar, relying on Mycroft's careful surveillance and my own observations when I could afford to be in London. I saw that in the place of dramatic outbursts, depression, and frequent sobbing sessions that typically accompanied mourning, there was instead a quiet, loyal grief. He went back to his useless therapist, Ella, to deal with the nightmares that had resurged with a vengeance. His limp came back, although I was grateful to note that it wasn't bad enough to bring back the cane. John soldiered on…he went back to work after a few weeks, picking up extra shifts since he no longer had to follow me around. He went out with Lestrade to the pubs on Thursdays. He ate dinner with Mrs Hudson almost every night. Sometimes he met Molly for coffee. It was all terribly normal behaviour for the terribly normal John Watson. But this time… all of his activities were tinged with a shadow of sorrow that walked behind him like his own shadow. He smiled and laughed and told jokes again, but there was always something behind his eyes that was vacant. Not vacant… on pause, like he was waiting for me to emerge from the shadows and tell him what an awful joke it was. Like Donovan, he seemed to always be searching the crowds for someone… a person that he never found.
That filled me with more sorrow than I had expected.
I hadn't expected that I would mourn. Not myself, obviously, because I knew better than anyone that I was still alive. But I mourned nonetheless, and the object of my bereavement was my old life. The thrill of travelling the globe incognito in order to track down a vicious network of criminals satiated me, but there was a different type of hunger that gnawed at my insides. I missed home. I missed John and lazy Sunday mornings with tea and the full English breakfasts he'd force on me. I missed the way he'd read bits of the newspaper to me when I didn't have cases to work on. I longed to hear Mrs Hudson's "yoo-hoo!" coming from the landing as she brought up food or a client. I longed for the comfort of 221 B and all the bits of home—like the skull or my microscope and my violin. I would have loved to have been back in London on a case with John and Lestrade...hell, even Donovan and Anderson.
As I stood in the middle of a field in northern Italy on a cloudy Tuesday in November, I mourned for my… my family and their absence from my life through this self-imposed exile. I let the sorrow I felt for my friends fill me up. It hurt, but I knew that what they were feeling was much worse. This would be my penance and my provocation to finish what I had started.
Overhead, a single crow took flight and I watched its sleek, black wings disappear into the steely sky. One crow for sorrow.
