Keepsake

by Verok

Summary: A lighter variation on the "John discovers/intuits that Sherlock is alive" one-shot. John receives Sherlock's coat and scarf after the latter's death. A week later both go mysteriously missing. John adds two and two.

AN: Originally was going to post this in January, in response to the massive angstfest that followed upon "The Reichenbach Fall." Somehow I didn't, but reviewing some old files recently, I decided I liked this irreverent almost-finished piece, and have now finished and posted it. Enjoy!

The tragedy had merely been a staged one, thank God, but Molly Hooper still found herself on the verge of tears.

It had been an extraordinary day, and despite the absence of real loss, a traumatic one too. And presently it was being made even more traumatic by a bereaved, wild-eyed Dr. Watson shouting in her face.

"H-he's a bit b-bashed up," she stammered, flinching under his onslaught. "You wouldn't want to see him —"

"He's — my — best — friend!"

"Please, Dr. Watson, it's b-better this way, trust me —"

John lunged for the door to the morgue, but Molly successfully threw herself in between.

"I c-can't let you in there!"

"Let me through, Molly." John's voice was dangerously quiet, his breathing rapid.

"If you're worried about him, Dr. Watson, p-please don't be. I-I'll take care of him. I p-promise."

John only stared at her. Molly's lower jaw began to tremble.

"Sherlock was a handsome man — w-wouldn't you agree, Dr. Watson? You'd want to remember him exactly the way he was, w-wouldn't you?"

Slowly, very slowly, John slid to the floor and dropped his face into his hands. Molly squatted down in front of him and gently grasped his arms.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Watson, I really am," she whispered, tears raining off her chin.

After an eternity of silent shaking, John lowered wet palms from his face. "No, Molly, I'm sorry," he croaked. "It's just — it's just — "

She shook her head frantically: he did not need to say more.

"I just have —" he cleared his throat violently — "I just want —"

"Anything, Dr. Watson. Tell me what you need."

"His things. I'm his friend —" another cough — "best friend, and I think he would have wanted me to look after them."

"His things," said Molly slowly.

"His coat. His scarf. Everything that was on him when he — when he —"

Molly understood. She nodded.

Cough. "Especially the coat. And the scarf. He was … he was … fond of both."

"I'll do my best, Dr. Watson."

Half an hour passed before she could help John off the floor.

Three days later a small parcel arrived from Bart's via registered post. John could only bring himself to open it after several Scotches. A Breguet watch, a pen, the pocket magnifying glass, Sherlock's small notebook. Nothing else.

At the bottom of the small box lay a note:

Sherlock has left everything in his possession to you, but as I am responsible for his memorial service I have taken the prerogative of providing the establishment overseeing his arrangements with a few necessities. Since his watch, pen, glass, and half-used notebook do not number among them, I return these to you.

I am sorry for your loss. M.

An hour later John was at the Diogenes Club, fuming.

"Don't tell me it's being buried with him," he said to Mycroft.

The latter, wearied as he seemed to be by grief, responded with an unusual lack of tart pomposity.

"My brother was never a materialistic creature, but if there was one inanimate thing he felt any modicum of attachment to, it was his coat."

"Not the skull?"

Mycroft grimaced in a poor imitation of a smile. "You must have noticed he never went without it. Not even in the summer. I suppose this is what he would have wanted — to head to the afterlife dressed in the way he would have headed anywhere in this life."

"Nope," said John.

"I beg your pardon?"

"It is not going into that cold box to rot underground. Not while I live. Sherlock would not have minded me having it. I was his best — his only friend."

"I was his brother," said Mycroft coldly, "and that coat was a gift from me."

John laughed bitterly.

"You could give him a thousand-pound coat, but neither safety nor happiness, apparently! Some brother you are."

"Get out!" snarled Mycroft.

But John only laughed harder. "Sherlock once went to Buckingham Palace dressed in a bedsheet, for God's sake, and he changed only after you bullied him. Do you think he would have cared how he dressed to meet St. Peter? Or Hades for that matter?"

Mycroft said nothing, but merely held John's moistening, perilously bright gaze until John had to look away and leave.

It rained heavily the day of the service. John did not return until well after it had concluded, well after darkness had fallen.

A large box sat waiting for him amid the profusion of lab equipment on the kitchen table. It was cream coloured, poshly elegant, such as one that would have enclosed a couture gown or a hat for Ascot.

Inside were the coat and scarf, folded neatly, and a note pinned on top.

Since you asked. M.

Slowly, tremblingly, John ran a hand down the contents of the box. The rich tweed was smooth and supple from use, the blue cashmere ragged at the ends. He'd never realised how worn they were — Sherlock must have had both for years and years. He lifted the coat half out of the box and pressed it to his nose.

It smelled like nothing — the nothing of clothing that had been chemically, professionally cleaned.

John's jaw clenched. Only a week ago he remembered inhaling a lungful of Sherlock when he'd yanked him through the bars of the gate, by the lapel, toward him ("We need to coordinate"). Tobacco, soil, London rain, a hint of Hendrick's and sweat. A heady aura he'd always taken for granted.

Utterly gone.

A small voice in the back of John's head told him that he'd been a fool to expect otherwise. There had been blood everywhere on the pavement that morning. Mycroft must have had no choice but to have both coat and scarf thoroughly cleaned. Not to have done so would have been indecent.

Still, the hole that was there in John's heart tore just a bit wider.

For many moments he stood there, clutching the coat, staring unseeing.

His tears softened its lapels till dawn.

The coat did not leave John's grasp for a week.

At night he slept with it bunched up in his arms, like a security blanket (the scarf went under the pillow). By day he wore it around the flat like a dressing gown. It flapped ridiculously about his ankles and was uncomfortably tight around the shoulders, but he didn't care. Of all of Sherlock's (admittedly numerous) possessions strewn about 221B Baker Street, it was the one thing which he could touch with every inch of his own skin, in which he could literally lose himself — the one thing in the world that was any evocation at all, however pale, of Sherlock's embrace.

After a week John managed to rid it of its smell of nothingness, but the scent of Sherlock did not return. Rather the coat — as could be expected — now smelled like himself. John took to using Sherlock's bodywash and deoderant and resolved to do so for as long as necessary, never mind the fact that they were both (naturally) very pricey brands, luxuries far too wasteful for a doctor on an army pension. Yet he still could not replicate Sherlock's scent with complete faithfulness, and a humiliatingly long span of time passed before he realized that it was because none of Sherlock's preferred products were scented.

The eighth evening after the burial of Sherlock Holmes, rain and wind lashed through John's bedroom from the open window. John did not mind. He lay in his bed curled securely as ever against the comforting tweed, yearning for the fading olfactory memory of his friend, watching the darkness through a watery veil.

The sun was upon his eyes when he woke, but he immediately noticed something wrong.

His arms were empty.

So was the mattress beneath his pillow, stamped with the moist impression of his face.

The curtains by the open window exhaled, licking the nightstand, and it was then that John noticed the text alert icon on his mobile, which had lain untouched near his bed for days.

Needed both back, said the flashing screen. Sorry.

The next two hours were spent crawling vainly around the windowsill, the bedroom and eventually the whole flat with Sherlock's pocket glass in hand, in between frenetic and fruitless sessions of calling and texting. It was then that John learned — or was, to put it honestly, crushed by the blunt realization — that in spite of the better part of two years spent observing the world's greatest detective, he had not really internalized a thing about that line of work. He tried with all his might to recall Sherlock's methods, a road map for a lost traveller in a familiar land turned strange, but he could retrieve only aphorisms, voiced in that rich baritone which - however achingly he thought of it - also reminded him keenly of his intellectual inferiority.

Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.

John's mind could not longer distinguish the impossible and improbable: the upending of his world had seen to that. But the only explanation his mind could conceive of at the moment seemed also like the sanest explanation. He had no data for it, and a world's worth of data against it, but John was not like Sherlock. John thought with the heart, and it told him the impossible was true, and that only one culprit could have had stolen both.

That afternoon Mycroft was once again surprised at his silent retreat by an irate army doctor barging into his study.

"Your brother's coat and scarf. They're gone."

Mycroft said nothing, but John could have sworn that for a split second his countenance had paled.

"I have already given it to you for safekeeping, per your request," the former said evenly, at length. "I am not responsible for you losing it."

"I didn't lose it — someone stole it. Care to help out here, Mycroft? Sherlock once called you his … his armchair version. Who would steal Sherlock's old clothes?"

Mycroft flinched at the epithet but turned the motion into a shrug. "Fans, probably. Fanatics."

"Well, the last time I checked, they were saying he was a fraud," said John through gritted teeth.

"I am sorry, John. Petty theft isn't my specialty."

"You aren't going to help me recover your brother's favourite … thing? Your gift to him?" John took out his mobile and thrust it at Mycroft. "I'm assuming this wasn't you. Am I right?"

Mycroft lifted an eyebrow. "Do I look like a man who tries to take back a gift when he's given it?"

"That wasn't exactly how I reasoned it, no. You're a man who prefers much more sinister and obscure ways of communicating than texting."

"Flattered."

"Well? Don't you have people who can trace anonymous texts?"

"You're the one who's lived with my brother and become his partner in justice," said Mycroft, ignoring the phone. "You know his methods. Use them."

John's lower jaw trembled. "I've already tried."

"And?"

The soldier lowered his gaze until Mycroft could not see his face. A long silence followed.

"I think … I think …"

"Say it aloud," said Mycroft, leaning forward in his seat.

John gulped and shook his head.

"I think I'm going mad," he whispered.

After the fruitless interview, John was left to deal with a dilemma of communication on his own.

The unknown texter (NUMBER WITHHELD) had made no response after a dozen calls and several times as many texts. Upon the thirteenth call and forty-third text John was greeted by a politely chagrined voice announcing an invalid number and an error message, respectively. He appealed to Orange, who were at first mystified and then fed up with his persistence regarding a stupidly innocuous matter. He called Lestrade, who refused (or was too mortified) to answer; Mike Stamford, who offered wearily to take him out for a drink; and Molly Hooper, who became progressively more frightened and finally voiceless under sustained interrogation. He then called Mycroft, whose number had also become mysteriously invalid. He called and called and called, until the battery icon on his mobile flickered and died and he hurled the dead phone across the sitting room.

Eventually he decided there was one other channel of communication open to him — only one other means that made any sense to his exhausted, tortured mind.

"Please, there's just one more thing," he said hoarsely, pacing fretfully in front of Sherlock's grave. "One more miracle, Sherlock, for me. Don't. Be. Dead. Would you do that, just for me, just stop it, stop this?"

But the marble did not speak, and no tall, dark figure in a greatcoat came striding out of the surrounding groves in response to John's remonstrances and pleas. Unable to bear another moment of maddening silence, John eventually turned around and left.

Unbeknownst to him, a pair of silvery eyes followed him from a great distance on his long march out of the cemetery.

"That was shockingly imprudent of you," said Mycroft, drawing up to the concealed observer from behind. "Not to mention childish."

Sherlock sniffed. "I changed my mind. So what?"

"You should have let him keep it."

"It's no longer being made. I couldn't have bought another one."

"You could have had one made for you."

"I can tell a person's life story by their clothes, Mycroft, but by no means do I consider myself enough of an expert on haberdashery to supply the patterns from memory. Besides, it would've been a rather easy way to give myself away, wouldn't it? A man looking like Sherlock Holmes ordering a bespoke Sherlock Holmes coat."

"It was the hat that defined you, Sherlock."

"Sod the hat. No sense of fashion, the public."

"Or you could have just gone without it."

"Out of the question. Can't fight crime — or whatever that's left of it in the post-Moriarty world — without my coat."

"Oh, dear little brother," sighed Mycroft, twirling his umbrella. "Ever so vain, even in death."

"Piss off."

Swish went the umbrella. "Suit yourself. Just don't come wailing to me if it's your sartorial needs that end up scuttling your plan to eradicate the Moriarty network." Mycroft paused, then looked thoughtful. "Then again, I have never known you to care so much about clothes."

Sherlock looked for a moment as if he were going to lob a brisk retort at Mycroft. But halfway through forming his words a shadow seemed to dim his countenance, and the crackle of his silvery eyes softened.

"John doesn't know I'm alive," he said quietly.

Mycroft raised an eyebrow.

"Does he?"

Sherlock wordlessly flicked his coat collar up, breathed deeply into the soft tweed, and sought the invisible spot in the trees where John had disappeared. Yet for all the glacial angst of his brother's posture and silence, Mycroft fancied he saw the ghost of a smile lingering on his lips.

AN: There. I don't know if I've just done a disservice to the Reichenbach plotline with this one — I hope I haven't. But I wouldn't put it past Sherlock to carry on even after "death" in his characteristically wry, clever, bratty way - and to break the rules he set for himself, out of love for John.

Please review! Also, if you liked my writing and are interested in something rather heavier, please check out another Reichenbach one-shot I've written, "Finale," about Sherlock's struggle to keep John in the dark about his plans before the Fall.

Fun fact: Belstaff did indeed discontinue production of the coat worn by Benedict Cumberbatch, but that was before "Sherlock" became a hit. Now that The Coat has become as iconic as the deerstalker and pipe, you can count on them — and other labels — to revive/reinterpret the design.