There is a modest, unassuming grave at the edge of Blackstone Cemetery, a few kilometers outside of the glittering city of London, England.
There's nothing truly defining about it, a slate slab that is nestled just beyond sight, only to be found if one is truly looking for it. The lot is surrounded with flower bushes, browning leaves fraying at the edges, dulled yellow petals blackening at the tips, curling towards their center as they shiver in the biting wind.
Thin, white lettering is stenciled upon the headstone, with elegant designs adorning the sides, curving up. It reads:
RICHARD ALLEN BROOK
October 21, 1976 – March 16, 1994
TOO YOUNG TO DIE
TOO OLD TO LIVE
The epitaph is short and sweet, in the fact that it's perhaps just a little too dark and just little too terrible for even a gravestone. It's a warped twist of a teenager's quote, pulled by a bitter family from a letter found haphazardly thrown upon a cluttered excuse of a dinner table.
A man stands before the grave, gray collar turned up against the mid-autumn chill, unzipped trench coat flapping against the back of his legs. He rolls a flower stem between two fingers; the head doing a full rotation and half before reversing at lightning speed. With every few turns, a couple of dark orange tendrils fall onto the grass below.
This man, almost two decades later, remembers Richard's death, remembers reading and rereading the 18-year-old's note, written with steady, spiky words. The note had held no blubbering, no cursing of the world, just a calm acceptance, with just a faint seep of that sociopathic anger laced within.
The man had been suitably impressed, understandably.
This man remembers the bullet through Richard's brain, the blood pooling under dark hair, running into the storm drain, thinned by rainwater. He had held it with the same hand that now twirls the long-dead flower, examined it with the same eyes that had overseen many more since then. He knows the gun too, can still feel his hand curling around the weapon. The weeks immediately after the death were more blurry to him, but then again, they were never important
It's been years since the man has visited this grave, and he almost wants to roll his eyes at his own over-sentimentality. However, even he knows that that's somewhat disrespectful, and Richard deserves his respect, at the very least.
Behind him, the man hears words being carried, someone cursing a gravestone, which turns into a pathetic plea. "Don't be dead," he says, "One more miracle, for me."
The man actually does laugh at that, low under his breath. The flower spins erratically in his grip.
The man gives Sherlock two, three, four years at the most, before he makes good on his little pet's wish. Because if there is one thing James Moriarty knows, it's a good old fake suicide.
Richard Brook
Reichenbach
Richard Brook
REICHENBACH
It had been so perfect, so fitting, that Richard would never call it a coincidence.
(of course, it was him who stole that painting and him who made the case and him who orchestrated the press and it was all him and it was always him him him)
Sherlock Holmes stands not one hundred meters away, wonderfully (and disappointedly) ignorant, and it makes Richard buzz in excitement.
James Moriarty drops his stripped marigold onto the grass, and walks off into the trees, his equally alive companion never once glancing his way.