for Brandy Mattibei, with my thanks
About five years after Reichenbach Falls
Appoggiatura
What flowers there were in the bride's bouquet, crowned among her hair, drooped like blooms in a hothouse gone long untended.
If the air conditioning at the guildhall was functioning at all, it would take an above-average detective's incisive mind to find clues to support any such fact.
She was nearly ready to go in, and yet she waited, hung back. No last-minute dread of what was to come, only, anticipation for who was yet to make a showing.
The outer door opened in the way of a guest who knows himself to be late, but when the bride's eyes met his they showed no relief at his arrival, only, still, the question.
"He is not coming?" she asked, anxious.
"No," the late arrival agreed, not as though sharing news, only as though the question had long ago been settled. "Not coming." He was brusquely to-the-point, though she had always known him as a kind man. At least in comparison to his comrade.
"There is a case-" she hypothesized, then changed her rationalization when the other man's face showed it was not so. "He is ill?"
"No," John Watson told her. "No case, and he is not ill." The medical doctor reflected for a moment, eyes to the ceiling in consideration. "In fact, I do not ever recall him being ill." He brought his eyes back to the woman before him, seemed to recognize that the brisk tone he generally used when attempting not to explain his partner Sherlock was not called for at the moment, and wrinkled his brow as he tried to remind her; "he did not come to your engagement party, Molly. Nor did he send a card or gift. He did not show when you had Robbie invite him on last night's stag pub crawl. In fact, I believe you know that he had the invitation you sent him for today returned to you marked 'Refused' in the post-unopened. You cannot have truly expected him." Watson's manner skated the narrow edge between humane caring and vague, unfocussed impatience at her persistent unwillingness to accept fact.
He did not see the bouquet coming, would never have imagined an arranged posy could hit the chest with enough weight to register so resounding a thump. Nor that the doing of such would have shaken enough pollen loose to give him several eye-watering moments of harsh, noisy sneezing as the bride, both her hands free, walked deliberately out through the door he had only just entered, and away from her waiting groom.
"I have no intention of paying to have your kit steamed and cleaned from damage incurred upon your misguided journey here," she heard him say from the upper floor as she struggled to ascend the narrow stairwell in the hoop and crinoline needed for the voluminous skirt of her frock to hold its rightful shape.
"…so you may as well go…"
She could see his hand waving in the air in her mind's eye (her self not yet to the opened doorway), the self-styled resident monarch of Baker Street issuing proclamations.
Cresting over the top step onto the landing was more of a trudge, the ladylike posh, abbreviated steps she had planned to walk by into the guildhall's main hall all but forgotten.
She could still hear him talking, but no longer in loud, ringing tones.
It was the dark jade dressing gown. So he had, truly, no intention whatsoever of going out. He had not considered attending even that much; to have dressed (or half-dressed) himself.
She employed one final push to get herself and her skirts through the doorway, and as she did so she saw his eyes catch on her, their usual inventory of every crease, every spot, imperfection or otherwise upon her self and her gown. She allowed a moment to deeply exhale, knowing his ritual cataloging saved her from the need to convey any point of her complicated journey here. Yet also fearing he would momentarily announce something dreadful, revealing that she had unwittingly purchased a frock stitched by the tiny hands of enslaved Laotian children forced to labor in inhuman conditions, perhaps. Or that her period was set to (unexpectedly) begin that night. That a trace of a corpse's brain matter had adhered to the back of her neck from her last night at work and she had not managed yet to wash it fully off. Something. Always there was something, some way to deflate the moment, to reveal a sharp, slicing edge to what she took for blissful, harmless happiness, for pleasant, uncomplicated contentment.
She knew well enough that he did have much in the way of his own (happiness, contentment, bliss), and so he took it upon himself to negate it for others whenever possible.
But though he examined her as fully (and as quickly) as any specimen he might ever encounter, he said nothing.
"You might have come," she spoke. "LeStrade is there, and of course you knew John came. And Mycroft, even-that is, I think he is there. Certainly there are enough men in lackluster suits that I have never seen before." She regrouped. "Why would you not come, even though you think I am being foolish and pubescently romantic?"
She did not know how, but she found herself on her knees beside where he sat upon the sofa, her hands and their until-recently impeccably manicured nails gripping into the pillows on either side of his legs.
His head gave a twitch. "I do not recall saying you were foolish," he answered her blandly, but his curiosity piqued.
"Okay, then. That you think I am making a mistake. It is mine to make, yes? Can you not be present, even if you disapprove?"
He brought his eyes to hers as though he were turning away from the haze of a dream. They were narrowed with a vague squint. "But I don't think you're making a mistake."
"You-what?" for a moment her mind rattled. "But," she tried to start again. "But-" Third time the charm, "You and I, we agreed. Agreed that…"
"I know what we agreed," he assured her, referencing a time when it had become clear that in certain regards their attempt at a love relationship could never grow passed a certain level of understanding.
His head gave a slight nod.
"So it is Robbie? You dislike Robbie?" She paused. "Give me strength-you do not know…something-unsavory about him?"
The bags under his eyes pulsed at the groom's name. "He has never given me any reason to believe than he is any less than you think him. And you are right, he can give you what you want-what certainly any decent person would want for you: a life, a companion, children. Love."
He spoke the word and she wondered if anyone other than herself had been watching him if they would have noted the constriction of his jaw, so slight, so fleeting. He did not look at her as he said it, but rather stared into the middle distance, as though he might find 'love' there, swimming just out of his reach.
"So why will you not come? What impediment to your attendance can there possibly be?"
He removed his eyes from their focus on that middle distance and returned them to her. "You're wearing Endless Blue," he announced, remarking on her perfume. "Has a problem chemical they've discovered. Been recalled." His eyes slid over to John's opened laptop. "All over the Internet this morning."
She shook her head to clear it and change focus to this sidebar. "Er," she said, "it's not, well, I only wore it for a change. Special day and all." As she spoke she examined his left cheekbone, the curve and hollow of it, and inspiration struck.
"I know what it is," she announced, uncurling into a standing position, chuffed with her discovery. "I know people," she asserted her expertise. "I work with people."
"The people you work with are dead," he deadpanned in response, not raising his chin-only his eyes-to see her at this new height. His impassivity was beyond belief.
"It is change," she told him. "You will not come because you think things are about to change. That there will be no space for you. That I will disappear into housewifery and babies and you will be left, here, behind-forgotten?" It had become a question by sentence end.
When she looked down from her revelation she thought she saw in his eyes a boy, not quite teenaged. Solitary, stubborn, and yet extraordinarily perceptive. There was something only transiently sad in those eyes. It then became defiant, as, she thought, had he. If he were going to treat the rest of the world to his laser-focus, he had no use for those who did not interact with him similarly. And so he acted out, he trumpeted his own brilliance, tried to amuse-to interest-himself when others did not.
He liked to be the first to say anything. He could not stand a crowd, would not deign to be lost within one. Even if that crowd were only the life-mate he and she had a year ago agreed she ought to look beyond him to find, a man who could offer her what they together had discovered he could not. A loving husband, and the children and life they two would have together.
She thought she could see what that boy might need to hear today. Then again, perhaps she was entirely wrong. Still, when she spoke to him, it was the truth.
"Robbie and I have talked. He knows. And, as much as he can, he understands. No matter what dreams may come," she meant to reference life changes such as marriage and offspring, but as a medical examiner fell awkwardly back onto one of death, "we will not change, you and I. We both agreed that day that it was unfair of me to expect you to promise me what I wanted from you. But this I promise you freely. This," she assured him, "I vow: we will always be as before. I shall let you into the lab, run whatever tests you ask me to, make ill-timed statements that you would rather I not, and answer my phone whenever you ring it. And you…" she added his task to her list with a wistful smile, "shall go on being Sherlock Holmes—"
An eyebrow arched. "And you shall never ask me to kiss one of your children?"
"And I shall never even ask you to remember the names of any of my children," she agreed good-naturedly, half laughing. "But instead go on endlessly inviting you to social occasions you have no intention of ever attending."
Somewhere in the midst of this vow she had again returned to his eyelevel, this time taking a seat beside him.
A short silence fell, and he reached over toward her hairline, removing a small sprig from the flower crown there. "Stock," he said, naming the bud. He considered for a moment. "Do you like to smell of cinnamon?"
"I thought it was pret-" she cut herself off, her eye catching the time, dismay at its growing-late reveal unable to be shaded as it crossed her face.
"You had best wash that Endless Blue away before something unfortunate comes of it," he apprised her regarding her recalled perfume, his usual diligence unaltered.
As she walked past the open door to his bedroom, the bride caught a glimpse of a suit hanging, still in the cleaners' plastic. Surely Mrs. Hudson had sent it out and had it returned for just this day.
Surely, Mrs. Hudson's doing.
Upon leaving the washroom, her wrists, neck and décolletage scrubbed free of the potential toxin, she returned to find him quite suddenly and surprisingly outfitted in same suit. It was dark in color, of course, and the fit was a bit 'creative'. It seemed natural that she found herself smiling at him.
"What is the point, really?" he asked, never referring to her earlier words or pitch. "Of not going? If you persist on hunting me down in such an outlandish and time-consuming fashion?"
As she walked toward him and she found herself even with his posture, he turned and unexpectedly touched her elbow, taking it between his fingertips as delicately as he might turn over a scrap of tissue paper at a crime scene. "Don't let me ruin your happy ending, Molly Hooper," he told her, his voice no louder than it had to be for her to hear his words in such closely intimate proximity. "Don't ever let me do that."
In answer, she smiled.
A text popped up on his mobile.
"Cabbie's here," he informed her, and only slightly increasing the pressure on her arm, escorted her toward the flat's doorway and down the staircase, first handing her into the waiting cab bound for Robbie and the guildhall, and then following suit.