The Reichenbach Fall

By the Centurion

John Watson turned away to walk back to the main building after having said his last goodbyes to his late friend Sherlock Holmes. All he could think of was the dreadful sight- Sherlock's body lying there on the pavement, nearly unidentifiable due to the damage. He still couldn't believe it was happening. It couldn't be. Sherlock claimed to be a fraud, but John knew that no man could fake the things Sherlock Holmes had aspired to do.

Little did Watson know, Holmes stood in the shadows waiting. He had to stay low until night fall. Then and only then could he reveal himself to John and Mrs. Hudson without problems. He would have to be delicate with the situation, no need to give Mrs. Hudson a heart attack. Not to mention the risk of taking a nice blow to the face from John.

Nightfall finally came and Sherlock headed to the country stead near the grave site. It was there that he would reveal his big secret. He heard a whirring noise, almost the sound of chains over gears, and knew that his back up had arrived. This story would be hard for the others to believe- proof was an absolute necessity.

He waited for the Doctor to catch up before slipping into the common room. The Doctor entered before him so as to assure that everyone was prepared for the shock to come. Luckily, everyone recognized him as a strange friend of Sherlock, though know one was truly acquainted with him.

"Sorry, I'm a bit late. " The Doctor said in a mournful voice, so as not to ruin the magician's final trick."I'm Sherlock's friend John Smith. I have some good news for you all, but you may want to sit down."

When everyone was seated, he signaled for Sherlock to enter. Sherlock did so while bracing himself for many hits to the face. Everyone was, as he expected, in shock. was crying (tears of joy he presumed), John was just stunned, and Mycroft was laughing.

"I'm sorry I did that to you all, but I could see no other way."

"But you...It was definitely you...I saw YOUR face as you fell...and you...flailed...no place to hide or avoid the fall...YOU WERE DEFINITELY DEAD!" John seemed a bit frustrated, confused, and angry as Sherlock had predicted.

"Well, you see..." Sherlock trailed allowing the Doctor to explain a few things before going on to the story.

"My name isn't really John Smith. Hello, I'm the Doctor... Just the Doctor...I'm the last of a race of alien time travelers know as Time Lords. Key word there is time traveler."

"So you see," Sherlock continued, "He's like me in the manner that he has enemies. I got the idea when I heard of how he faked his own death to avoid the collapse of the universe."

"We'll get to the technical stuff later."

"Yes. When I was working in the lab, Molly and I had a little chat in which she stated that as my friend, if I ever needed a favor I could just ask her. So the clock counted down to my ultimate demise and I thought, 'How can I get out of this? Die and come back? ' Then I remembered that Molly knew people in UNIT- she's spoken of wanting to work with them. UNIT has ties to my good friend, here. I knew the Doctor could rig me up with something so that I could literally be the one to make the fall, but walk I got Molly to help me contact him."

"This is where my story comes in. I have some friends with a special machine that replicates humans. It's a machine driven by tiny people and uses a miniaturization ray. When I had to go through the same thing as Sherlock, here, I simply asked them to imitate me and let me stay on the bridge to help out with speech and mannerisms and such. So I was in the machine when the big finally came. We did the same thing for Sherlock, but since futuristic weapons were not in use, we had to have a way to imitate a gruesomely damaged human face."

"Correct, so we took pictures of some bodies in the morgue, compiled the pictures with my face, and gave it to the tesselator operators." Sherlock smiled with pride in his thinking as he finished of his story.

"So now to deal with the disbelief, "the Doctor said, straightening his bow-tie, "Come along!"

He lead the group outside to the TARDIS. "This is my Time Machine," the Doctor explained. As per usual, there were remarks about the whole concept of "bigger on the inside", except for from John.

"So how exactly did you escape from this so-called-tesselator without someone noticing? I mean a crew of people beaming back to full size like on Star Trek isn't exactly something to go unnoticed."

"Simple, John. We made our escape when the coroner left the autopsy room. With no witnesses, we were free to leave through the window."

The End.

Note: Just a little diddy I wrote because no one else has done this. This is literally the only logical way my imagination can conceivably explain how Holmes survives in Sherlock. This one was not written by the *whole* trio, just me. We will quite possibly collaborate on a full series of short stories to fill this, but I will definately continue working on these What If? Stories as a side project to our major stories. Thanks for reading!