This is what I know about death;
Sherlock is dying.
Sherlock is dying and it's his last night on Earth.
Sherlock is dying and it's his last night on Earth and he is spending it with me.
Before Sherlock got sick, I thought I already knew everything there was to know about death. It was my trade, after all. It's what I did every day. I dealt in death. I could construct stories out of bodies. I could look under bones, beneath tissue, and see around them. I could see how their heart stopped beating, their lungs stop breathing. I was friends with Death. It was my safe place. Ever since my father died, I had placed myself around death. I had become to centre of it. I let it spin around me. Aneurisms, coronaries, drug overdoses, hangings, stabbings, the entire kaleidoscope of death was mind to play with. My life was meaningless, colourless, and death filled it. I needed to find answers and forensic pathology is all about answers.
Right now, in his bedroom, there are no answers. He is lying heavy and breathing lightly. Wrapped up tight in his silk dressing gown. His black, scruffy curls have all but fallen out. He doesn't look like Sherlock anymore. He doesn't sound like Sherlock anymore. The tone of his voice is different, perhaps because he has experienced pain firsthand for once, and it's taken the bite out of his words, the sting out of his tail. I used to wish for that. I used to want him to be kinder, softer. I wanted his words to carry the same softness as his body held when I slipped beneath the bed sheets next to it. We were so still those nights. I hardly dared to make a sound. For awhile, I believed that my new world would dissolve if I moved too fast. All I wanted was to keep the same position, lying next to him, hiding the shaking beneath my skin the cold, sweat on my face. Of course, you can't hide anything for Sherlock and he was cruel about it. Or maybe not cruel, just curious. You would think that, out of the two of us, he would have been the one that didn't understand what was happening. He would be the one not able to deal with it. The one to freak out in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day, or at unpredictable times when the truth of our situation hit, when the fact that we were together struck. But it was me it confused, me who it unsettled. Day by day, we grew into each other. We went from two people sleeping in still silence to two people who wrapped limbs and moulded into one.
When we found out he was dying, it all came back. The fear, the confusion, the desire to stay as still as possible so that nothing could change, so that the moment could freeze just as it was, with us both alive and together. On the tube home I looked at his reflection in the opposite window. He didn't look defeated or scared. He didn't even look angry. But he didn't look like himself anymore. Not to me. To me, he was already fading and if I couldn't stop him, I wanted to go with him. I wanted to ask him if he looked at me that afternoon. If he saw anything about my face alter, my body change. I'm sure he didn't notice anything, thought, not in the way he had noticed things for his entire life. He wasn't reading people and he wasn't reading me. Six months is a long time on January 1st but it was the middle of May when we sat on that crowded, underground carriage.
Deep down, I knew enough about life and death to know it wouldn't be six months at best. It would be quicker, much quicker, and I told him so. I knew he would never forgive me and I knew, at some point, he would ask for my opinion. At the time, they were the hardest words I ever said, not numbed by the hardest word I would soon, too soon, ever have to say.
He didn't have a bucket list, that would be fucking ridiculous, Sherlock fucking Holmes thinking about his future. He lived in the moment, exactly in the moment, it was remarkable considering how much he saw and how much he thought, that he could commit himself completely to the present. I joked that he'd make a good Buddhist and for once he actually laughed. I can still hear it, if I close my eyes, and despite myself I smile.
There were, however, people whom he needed to tell.
Moriarty had written the list for him three years ago but it had grown slightly since then. Now there was Mary, whom he loved despite himself, and the baby. John wanted to call him Myc to piss off Mycroft, and Sherlock approved. Even Mycroft laughed and deep down I think John wanted to thank him, despite how big an arsehole he could be, he had saved their lives a lot, and John had always paid off his debts. I'm not sure how Sherlock felt about his honorary nephew and it felt like something I could never ask. Occasionally, I would lapse into passiveness, the way I was when I first fell in love with him, the part of me that didn't believe the life I was living and was scared to do anything to change it. I wondered if he was jealous of the baby, because of how much time it took out of John's life, time that he was used to spending with John; going to restaurants and watching him eat, verbally abusing his intelligence and, obviously, running around London like a pair of fucking school kids on truant. I wondered, also, if he was actually jealous of John, I wondered if Sherlock wanted his own child, our child. I had never asked him, paralysed again by fear and shyness, and he had never mentioned it, not even now Myc was around.
I knew his goodbyes to John would be gut wrenching and I had no desire to be around for it. In the end, I don't even know where they went, only the glimpse of John's red, tearstained face through the frosted glass of his front door. Sherlock, too, looked shaken, frightened, consumed with a loneliness I knew that I could never fill. I could never bounce off him. I could never inspire him. I could never be the bravest, brightest human being he knew. But then, that wasn't my role, that was who I was a person. I am fearful and spend my life amongst the dead. I am dull, in colour, pale, and although I am human I haven't felt like one in a long time. I have been a part of a much more brilliant soul, a cleverer man, a fearless man. I am only those things when he stands besides me and right now, lying beside me, sweating out morphine, he isn't standing next to anyone, even next to me.
The visit to the police station was harder than I expected it to be. Maybe because it's where I first met him, or where my friends work, but I didn't expect myself to cry as he told Lestrade, for my hands to shake inside his as Greg's face fell to the floor. The rest of the station were hard, too, because they still felt the weight of responsibility and I feel the guilt of carrying that secret past them every day, for two years, and trying not to notice Anderson blame himself one minute and then to demand that Sherlock was still alive the next. Their emotions were so hard to ignore, or to duplicate, and I became a harder woman, I became fierce and I became a lot less kind.
The hardest for me was the night we told Mrs Hudson. She had been baking and noticed that Sherlock wasn't drinking his tea ('come on, Sherlock, it's not like you to refuse tea! I thought you considered it impolite!'). I will remember the smell of those cakes later, when the morphine hits my stomach and it starts to churn with emptiness. I had to look away from her tears, as if they were indecent, offensive, as she collapsed on Sherlock and they both started to shake, her sobs hysterical and open, his desperately silent and contained. That night, I saw his shell crack and it scared me more than the cold, hard fact that he would be soon be dead.
We agreed. We argued, he shouted but in the end we did agree. He wasn't happy and thought it was pointless. He didn't believe in any version of an afterlife so couldn't understand why I would want to follow him to nowhere. Deep down, I didn't believe in it either, but the pain of living without him would be the same as a thousand volts directly to the heart. My insides would be fried. From head to foot I would be burnt, charred, my skin would be black, if any skin remained, any my ribcage would not protect my vital organs. It would crack, it would splinter, it would disintegrate. He told me shut up. He said that I was a stupid fucking needy girlfriend and the reason why he had never indulged in one before. I started to cry, and he started to cry, and as I hung off him like a branch in a tree, shaken by the storm, he understood. He could see what I could see, what I could feel. He knew that there would be no life for me without him, so why not become extinct? Why not join him on this journey?
I made a promise that I wouldn't cry. I would let the morphine lick my veins and numb me. I would be strong as we lay, side by side, wrapped up in silk and opiates. My cheek fitted into the curve of his and we lay, counting each breath, holding hands, he turned to me, three minutes, two minutes…
'I love you, Molly Hooper, you're always saving me.