PART I: Watching
Seven Months after Reichenbach: London.
Sherlock Holmes was, for all intents and purposes, dead. Seven months earlier, he had staged an elaborate suicide involving, among other things, a rubber handball, an overly loyal pathologist named Molly, and a bloody body lying on the concrete out front of St. Bart's. His trick had succeeded just as he had meticulously planned-there was even a nice onyx headstone in a small North London cemetery with his name in impeccable engraving, the finality of which no one questioned.
With no hope of returning to 221B Baker Street, Sherlock had turned to his beloved homeless network for help. A few fifty pound notes later, he had comfortably assumed the identity of a struggling avant garde violinist who had recently succumbed to AIDS, leaving his industrial hellhole of a loft abandoned-aside from the colonies of used syringes.
But his new life left him flat and, more unsettling to the former consulting detective, bored. He'd taken to wandering the streets, people-watching, silently deducing their entire life stories from their gait, their umbrellas, their choice of beverage. He deduced the mailman, the greengrocer, anyone who could, if even for a second, distract his mind. His favourites were the tourist families at Picadilly. He always did enjoy a good family spat-for God's sake, Mycroft practically taught classes in dysfunctional family dynamics-and tourists, with their jet lag and their fanny packs and their screaming toddlers, did not disappoint.
Sherlock would walk the streets of London, relentlessly seeking any and all intellectual stimuli to distract himself from his predicament. He walked until his soles ached and his head grew heavy with the exhaustion of a life so lonely and mundane, it was the only punishment fit for the disgraced genius.
Despite his distaste for sentiment, his walks inevitably led him down Baker Street. He would stop by about once a week, just to check up. Sometimes he stood across the street, idling nursing a cigarette while observing the comings and goings of 221B. Sometimes he stood on the front stoop, eyes level with the knocker, finger poised to ring the bell. But he never actually moved his finger that last quarter inch; Mrs. Hudson would probably fall dead at the very sight of his face and, well, that would just be counterproductive. But checking up-what harm could it do? And besides, he needed it. It brought him a small sense of reassurance that the world had continued to turn after Reichenbach, that John and Mrs. Hudson had kept on, that his death was his and his alone.
But today when he glanced up at the window of the second floor flat-formerly home to his characteristically morbid collections of anatomical tchotchkes-Sherlock saw, for the first time, the slow toxicity of his death.
John was making tea-a perfectly normal ritual for the retired army doctor. Sherlock watched, enraptured, as his singular friend carefully measured two sugars into his cup. The former detective smiled an almost imperceptible smile, the corners of his mouth turning up ever so slightly as he remembered John and the sugar and Baskerville.
Having helped himself to enough sugar, John sat back into Sherlock's cracked leather chair and placed the steaming mug on the low table. He slowly sunk his head into his hands, massaging his temples with his index fingers. A headache. Seven months previous, Sherlock would have inferred John's pains were the result of too much wine the night before with whatever floozy he was currently courting. Now, Sherlock knew better. John hadn't talked to a woman besides Mrs. Hudson for months, much less vainly attempted to entertain one in a too-dim restaurant. Mrs. Hudson kept pushing him to ask the green grocer's niece out for drinks, but John adamantly refused. "It doesn't seem right," he would say, as he and the landlady-not-housekeeper sat in Speedy's on Sunday mornings.
Sherlock was still staring at John's hunched back-funny how no one had bothered to change or rearrange the furniture since he'd left; people normally do, when someone dies-when John unexpectedly rose from the chair. His back still to the window, he moved to the mantel, where he inspected something closely, running his finger along it, tracing its shape. Sherlock strained to make out what it was but-oh, bloody hell, it was just too far away to tell. He was about to give up when John turned around, and Sherlock glimpsed the object of the blogger's ministrations.
John stood, oblivious to his watchful audience, cradling a pistol in his hands. His hands: his tired, weathered, steady hands. With serene confidence, John lifted the gun to his mouth and fired.