I hope you like musical accompaniments. Because I have playlist ideas.

If you have Spotify or another online music account, use that, but Youtube will do the job just as well.

When you see a central title in bold, that's the song I'd like you to start playing whilst you read. It adds so much!

For example, the songs I'd like you to play during this chapter are:

- 'Leave', by Glen Hansard.
- 'All The Way Down', by the same.

Enjoy and please review! I lose the will to write if I don't get steady amounts of reviews.


1

Once, once, I knew how to look for you.
Once, once, but that was before.
But not any more.
Hear the sirens call me home.


He paced.
And paced.
Some more.
Back around.

The floorboards creaked beneath his shoes.

Lying low.
Lying down.
Lying to London, lying to his enemies.
To his friends.

He wasn't dead.
So why wasn't he alive?
He had no material. He had no data.

Data, data, data.
Was there anything else? Anything worth living for?

He heaved himself into a chair, abruptly cutting off the pacing he'd been doing for the past two hours.
He needed to hunt.
He needed to discover things.

He couldn't afford the cocaine any more.
He couldn't work.

He, he, he.
It was all about him.
No longer about the chase, the criminal, the police officers who danced in the spotlight after the curtain had fallen, and the case was over.

It was just him now.
Him and all his parts, laid bare upon a stage with no audience.

He didn't like being so open to himself.
Because -
Because she was gone, and she consumed him.


'Leave'.

He was alone.
There was nobody to witness him folding up and breaking down.

He wiped away a tear.
Another.

He held his breath to stop his chest from jerking.

He wouldn't break down.
He wouldn't break down.
Because it wasn't something that he did.

He leaned his elbows upon his knees, and his forehead against his laced fingers.
And closed his eyes.
And sucked in just one breath.

Her shocking grey eyes, the storms of oceans swirling darkly within them, the soft paleness of her complexion, the petite beauty of her nose, her dimples when she smiled, her full rich scarlet lips, the way they pressed against his mouth, the strong but feminine set of her jaw, her rouged cheekbones, her perfectly even teeth.

Her indefatigable energy, her double-edged lethality, her quick mind and quicker senses, her inability to die.
Inability to die.

There was no question about it, though. No question this time.
She hadn't run away.
Moriarty had taken her from him as suddenly as a flower may be plucked from its stalk.

Moriarty's word was law.
When he was alive.

Why had he thrown away that handkerchief?
He could remember the smell of her Parisian perfume quite clearly now, but what of another few months? A year?
Smells were such slippery things in the memory. The most difficult part of his job.

He could recognise a scent put in his path in an instant, when information came flooding back to him, triggered by the deja vu sensation that smell depended upon.
But retaining a scent over time? Even he wasn't sure that he could pull it off.

He had thrown away the handkerchief because Watson had his eyes on him.
Those concerned eyes.

Where were they now?

It was too early to come out into the world yet.
Too soon even for Watson to know.
He was utterly alone.

He should be used to it. The knack should come second nature to him.
Being alone.
Wasn't it what he used to do best?
Shirley no-mates. That was him.

But Watson was gone. And she was gone.
And he couldn't lose one without having the other there.

He was going to go utterly mad.
Here. In this dingy, barely-afforded corner of London that wasn't fit for the rats, let alone himself.

Where were his belongings?
Where was his life's work?
Where was the familiar sense of homecoming, of comfort from his accumulated books, from his needle habit, from his small yet infinitely important experiments?

It was just him and Grief now, alone together, in this grey room, hungry.

He got up from the chair, but slowly.
He was dog tired.
He had never felt so tired in all his life.

He could do without food and he could do without home.
But he couldn't do without Irene.

Her absence was paradoxical - instead of feeling like something had been ripped away from him, he sensed an indescribable weight being added unto his breast.
As though his heart had turned to solid brass and rusted.

It fatigued him.
He was exhausted. Of existing. Of being forced to feel so much.
How on earth did every other human being on this earth cope with emotion?
It was the most ridiculous type of malady he had ever encountered.

He trudged, ever so slowly, tiresomely, over to the bare mattress on its cold steel frame.
He curled up on it, folded his knees into his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and slid his eyelids shut again.

He wished and prayed and agonised for sleep.
He needed sleep.
He was so tired.


'All The Way Down'.

But her gorgeous face was in his mind's eye, and she was watching him with a bright, fiendish smile, with her head cocked to one side and her grey eyes shining, and her dimples were showing, and he couldn't allow her face to slip away into darkness. His very subconscious rejected oblivion, to retain her painfully delicious form in his memory.

Irene. Irene.

They were in their old hotel room, the time when he hadn't woken up handcuffed to the bed with no memory of the night before.
She was wrapped in a silky white sheet, and her dark curls were washing over her shoulders, and she was looking up at him from her pillow with a gaze full of admiration and tenderness.

The bedroom. It was the only time that she ever pulled that face in his plain view.
So that he could see the effect that he had upon her. So that he could see the trust underneath her skittish wariness of him.

Her body was full and curvaceous, and excuciatingly soft, as his palm traced its outlines from her shoulder all the way down her waist and over her hip, and then to her knee.

"Marry me." he had murmured, on a complete whim, only half-meaning it.
His fingers had toyed with her ringlets, just like an artist's fingers brushed for a second along his finished masterpiece.
As though there were nothing more significant or close to his soul.

"No." she had smirked, and planted the gentlest kiss on his chin. His clean-shaven chin.
When was the last time he had been clean-shaven?

She had looked so incredible as she had rejected him outright.
And his heart had swelled with love at her one word.
She was a worthy adversary indeed.

Watson didn't know about that third, most secret time that she had made him look like a fool, and laughed at his expense.
He had laughed with her, because he knew that anything other than this lifestyle would never be what he wanted.

He didn't want to marry her. He wanted her to stay this way forever.

He wanted to stay locked in eternal back-and-forth romantic combat with her.
He wanted to love and refute her, to steal her from the jaws of death and then put her in manacles of his own making.

He never wanted to leave that bed.

On the bare mattress in the bare room, Sherlock finally fell into sleep, in the middle of reaching out to find the hand of one who was not there.

In his illustrious imagination that was swiftly turning into a dream, she clasped his fingers tightly and kissed their tips one by one. She came to his thumb, and allowed it to run over her full lower lip, like he loved to do.

She settled into his side as he threw a casual arm around her, pulling the covers closer around their naked forms.
She looked up into his eyes with a sweet, winning stare, and he felt that he could see the whole iron-grey ocean, and its violent waves, and its cool overcast beaches.

"I love you."
He could tell that he was dreaming because she had never said anything so sentimental in the whole time that he had known her.

He didn't care. Rather, he took his opportunity with all the fervor he had been holding back in her real acquaintance.

"I love you more. I never have loved anybody, until you. Darling. I shall never stop. You are the only thing that holds me to humanity. I am stone cold without you. I cannot feel a thing. Irene, let us stay here forever."

"Forever is an awfully long time, Sherlock."

"Not long enough. Especially when sleep will interfere."

"I fear that I shall sleep a terrible lot, being stuck here all my life."

"There are worse things."

Yes. There were worse things.
He was to rediscover that when he next awoke.