A/N: Why, yes, I can write fanfic other than Mass Effect, lol. This drabble has been on my desktop since January, after I watched season 2 and learned of Believe Sherlock and John Watson's Warriors. So here is proof that ME isn't all I write. The female narrator is deliberately anonymous but she is not Irene Adler because I loathe how they portrayed her in both the series and the current movies. As far as I'm concerned, IA is dead in both.
She read the blog over and over again. The words searing themselves in her memory as her eyes feverishly raced over them. They struck a chord in her, a deep bass boom of truth that shivered through her senses and demanded to be heard and understood.
He told me that he invented Moriarty. That the newspapers were right all along. He told me to tell those who knew him he was a fraud and a fake. He wanted me to tell you, the world, anyone who would listen to me that he created Moriarty for his own purposes. A last request of sorts. A death bed confession, as it were. His final note.
A load of total shit.
So I'm to believe him, as I believed him so many times in the past, watching over and over again as he was proved right and others wrong. I'm to believe the evidence I saw with my own eyes. Or the words I heard with my own ears.
Do I believe the man I saw or the words he said? What do I believe?
Richard Brook was a fraud.
Moriarty was real.
I believe Sherlock.
That's what I believe. And I'm the only one who believes.
John H. Watson
No. No, he wasn't the only one who believed, she thought shoving back from her desk, pacing the room in her lounge pants and tank top, bare feet barely noticing the luxurious carpet under her feet. She had read John Watson's blogs. She had researched the cases in the papers and on the net and through her own underground connections. She had seen where the carefully crafted fantasy in the police reports glossed over reality and ignored implausibility simply so those who wanted to believe the lie could.
And there was no denying that there were a lot who did.
Those who had once followed his blog like fanatics now used it to tear John Watson down, call him a fool so caught up in the lie that he was missing reality. They mocked him, insulted him. Suggested habits and perversions meant to demean him and make him go away but John Watson had not gone away and his voice had not been silent. His message had not changed. He was still fighting this war for Sherlock Holmes. His war.
Determined, she clenched her fists, pacing the room as something in her grew, something that refused to be denied, something that demanded that she stand and fight and ensure that honesty prevail. That this injustice be corrected.
Only she didn't know how.
How to right this wrong when it had claimed the life of…well, not an innocent, she didn't think even John Watson, who knew Sherlock Holmes best, would go so far as to claim that, but it had claimed the life of someone who had tried to do good. Who had tried to help.
Her furious pacing left her standing before her vanity staring at the reflection of wild eyes, tousled hair and thin lips. The visage of a mad woman and with a sudden laugh, that mad woman grabbed a tube of lipstick jerking the top off to toss aside as she leaned forward and made her pledge to herself.
The scarlet letters remained after she flung the mashed tube to the side and headed for her shower.
I fight John Watson's War.