AN: So this has been in my brain for a really long time, but now finally exists in a form that I can actually share with others. Also Stephen in the story is meant to be Anderson because it doesn't make sense to me that Sally would refer to him by his last name. While I'm fairly sure that's obvious, I'm paranoid that it won't make sense so I'm putting it here.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
It's raining the day of Sherlock's funeral, and Sally tries her hardest not to take it as a bad omen. She lives in London after all. Finding profound cosmic messages in London rainstorms is a little like trying to assign meaning to every individual grain of sand in the Sahara desert. Still, as she lies in bad watching the droplets hit her window and trying not to remember the sight of Sherlock's broken body, Sally can't help but think of the weather as unbearably fitting.
It takes her a long time to work up the strength to get herself out of bed. Sally has dreaded a lot of things during the 30 years she's been alive, and even more during the five and a half she's spent working at the Yard. However, she's pretty sure she's never dreaded anything quite so much as this funeral. People think it's her fault. She knows that. She's trying her very, very hardest to be okay with that. The small faction of people who don't think Sherlock was a criminal mastermind hate her deeply for the role they believe she played in his death.
"But we're not going to think about that, are we?" She whispers to Estragon, her cat who has taken this moment to jump up onto the pillow beside her head and demand to be fed. "No, no. We are going to get up, get dressed, go to this bloody thing, then come back here and never think about any of this again." Sally has always avoided the impulse of talking to Estragon as if he could understand her, writing it off as something that pathetic, lonely people did. Still, today she's feeling a bit pathetic and lonely so she's not really sure what the harm is. Estragon responds by glaring at her and letting out a particularly loud meow. Realizing that he isn't going to be quiet until he's fed and that she's going to be unforgivably late if she doesn't get up soon, she heaves herself out of bed.
Sally goes through the motions of showering, and feeding Estragon and herself without thinking about much of anything. This comfortable numbness falls away a bit once she finds herself standing in front of her wardrobe, though. She's not exactly sure what the proper dress code is for the very public funeral of a man you've always hated whose suicide you may have indirectly caused. She shakes her head hard, trying to dispel her thoughts with the motion. That particular train of thought is not going to be particularly conducive to getting herself out the door and surviving the next few hours. Sally grabs the first black skirt, blouse and jacket she finds, pulls them on quickly and walks out the door of her flat before she can psych herself out any more.
The funeral is even worse than she'd expected, it turns out. The church is packed, with hordes of onlookers not lucky enough to find seats crowded around the back doors. She feels everyone's eyes turn to land on her as soon as she walks through the door of the sanctuary. She'd been interviewed several times since the beginning of the whole debacle, and as a result her grim, unsmiling police ID photo had been plastered across the headlines of countless newspapers. She's fairly sure that her current expression is a close match of the one in that photo, so it wouldn't have been difficult for followers of the case to recognise her. Sally can deal with the stares of those people, though. She's not overly happy about it, but she knows that their thoughts of her likely start and end with idle curiosity. No, the stares she can't deal with are those of her co-workers, of the few people who'd actually known and respected Sherlock, and, oh god, of John Watson in particular.
She only allows herself to look at John for a few seconds, but that's long enough to see the dead eyes and hollow cheeks of a man who has been utterly, irrevocably destroyed. Sally looks away quickly. She slides into a pew at the back and stares down at her hands, counting the minutes until the whole thing is over and she can go home.
She sits there for a few minutes before Stephen walks in, his arm wrapped around his wife's shoulders. Sally feels herself go cold. She hasn't been able to face him since all this started. His wife had gone away for a few days just after Sherlock's death had hit the papers. She'd gone over the first night and found herself unable to meet his eyes. He'd touched her and she'd been overcome with guilt unlike anything she'd ever felt in her life, the image of Sherlock's body on a slab in the morgue burning behind her eyelids. She's avoided him since. But now he's here, sitting a few rows in front of her, talking to his wife and looking like he doesn't have a care in the damn world. Sally sits quietly and stares, hating him.
She can't pay attention to the service once it starts. She tries. She really, really does. But she finds the voice of the vicar fading in comparison to the voice in her own head, the one telling her that this is all her fault, that by exposing him she might as well have pushed him off that roof herself. She starts to feel sick, like the walls of the church are closing in on her and all she can see are the faces of John, of Greg, and Mrs. Hudson and all she can hear is the constant repetition of that one bloody newspaper headline suicide of fake genius, suicide of fake genius suicide of fake genius suicide –
She gets up and runs out of the sanctuary, feeling hundreds of pairs of eyes on her all the way up the aisle. She doesn't stop once she's out in the lobby, doesn't stop until she's out the front door and into the cold air. Sally sits down on the steps of the church and forces herself to breathe, fighting the ever-growing urge to throw up. She'd been so sure, so sure, that she was right. She and Stephen both, unable to see any other possible explanation. She remembered the exhilaration she'd felt, telling the Chief Superintendent her suspicions with Stephen by her side. She'd been so sure that she was bringing justice, flush with the idea of all the lives she was saving by exposing Sherlock.
But now in the cold light of day, seeing the few people Sherlock had genuinely cared about struggling to pick up the pieces of their lives, she suddenly wonders why she was so sure. All the signs had seemed to be there, but now that she really thinks, there was no real evidence. And Sally is a Detective Sergeant, for God's sake, she knows the importance of hard evidence. How many cases has she had to throw out because of a lack of conclusive evidence? And yet in this case, she'd let her gut feelings guide her. She had felt that Sherlock was guilty, so she told everyone he was.
Breathe, she tells herself sternly. Calm down. Sherlock is dead. He is dead and being buried within a few hours. She can regret and second guess herself as much as she wants but she can't bring him back. She presses the heels of her hands over her eyes, telling herself that all the pieces had been there. Almost every sign seemed to point towards Sherlock's guilt. Even if Sherlock hadn't exactly been caught red-handed, she still had every reason to believe she'd been right. The man was a serial killer. The man was most likely a serial killer. And really, the world was much better off without one more psychopath.
The church doors bang open, jarring Sally out of her reverie. She sucks in a deep breath, desperately hoping to keep her composure in front of whoever had just come out. She turns to the newcomer, and feels a fist of ice tighten in her chest when she sees that it's Stephen.
"Sally," He says, coming to a stop a few steps away from her. She turns her head away from him. If she had to pick one thing that she wants to do least right now, talking to Stephen would likely come up on top.
"Shouldn't you be with your wife?" She asks him, trying to insert as much coldness as she can into her voice.
"I told Helen I wanted to be alone." He tells her. "This is a funeral of a man I worked with, it's not terribly difficult to believe." It makes her feel even worse to hear him talk about the excuses he's making to his wife. She's never been terribly happy with their arrangement, with seeing him in secret whenever his wife is away. She can't count all the times she's told him she couldn't see him anymore. That her feelings for him weren't enough to justify breaking up his marriage. And yet there had always been a next time, when she was feeling particularly alone and his call came at the exact moment that she thought she would go mad in her empty flat. But in light of what's happened, what they've done to Sherlock, it all feels even more wrong. She can barely stand to look at him anymore.
"I can't do this anymore, Stephen." She tells him. Her voice is brittle, and she prays that she can get through this encounter without losing it entirely. Stephen awkwardly lowers himself onto the steps beside her and Sally has to resist the urge to edge away from him.
"Come on now," He says. "Again? If it's about Helen, I will leave her. I really will." She turns to look at him, and something in her expression must convey how many times she's heard this exact sentence. "I mean it this time. The whole thing has pretty much run its course now. We can both feel it." Sally really can't stand to listen to any more of this.
"It isn't about that." She tells him.
"Then what?"
"It's just that…" And she is horrified to feel that her eyes are filling with tears, her throat closing up so she has to fight to get the next words out. "You don't even seem to care. It's like it hasn't even occurred to you that a man jumped off a rooftop, essentially because of us." Stephen laughs mirthlessly.
"Oh come on." He said. "Sherlock was a freak. A freak and a psychopath and even if we did inspire the suicide, I'm not going to feel bad over the death of a murderer." It's almost the exact thing that Sally had been telling herself earlier, but coming from his mouth the words seem hollow. She recoils from him slightly, feeling disgust rise in her chest as she realises the utter depth of his apathy about the situation. There are a million things that she could say to him. She could share her worry that they'd been wrong, her guilt over John and Mrs. Hudson. But she can already predict his reaction. Already hear his condescending reassurances before she's even opened her mouth. She doesn't need this, she decides. And in that moment, her decision pertains to both the conversation they're currently having and the whole dysfunctional not-quite-a-relationship that they've been in for nearly two years.
She stands up, straightening her skirt and looking Stephen straight in the eye for the first time since Sherlock pitched himself off the roof of St. Bart's. "I'm going." She tells him. "I'm leaving and I don't want you to follow me, or call me, or talk to me at work if you don't strictly need to." He looks utterly shocked and she wants to laugh in his face. She wants to gloat that she's not his sure thing anymore, that he can never have her at his beck and call ever again. But honestly, even that seems like it would prolong their interaction more than she can stand.
"What are you saying?" He asks, and Sally thinks he has never looked more pathetic than he has in this moment.
"I'm saying we're done." She says. "And I'm saying goodbye." She turns on her heel and walks away, not even giving him the chance to respond.
Initially, her plan is to go home, take the hottest shower she can stand and go to bed for several days. Halfway to the tube, though, she changes her mind. Because yes, going home and wallowing in her guilt and sadness sounds appealing, but it isn't going to help anybody. If she's honest with herself, she knows that she'll have a lot of time to wallow in the future. Putting it off slightly isn't going to kill her. So Sally turns a few blocks earlier than she would for the tube and ducks into a flower shop. She walks up to the desk and arranges for big bouquets of lilies and baby's breath to be sent to John, Greg and Mrs. Hudson. As an afterthought she sends another to the morgue for that sweet girl who'd always made eyes at Sherlock.
Even as she's doing it she knows that it isn't actually going to help anything. That they will all be drowning in flowers after the funeral anyway. But it still makes her feel better to actually be doing something. If a bouquet of flowers even goes the slightest way towards apologising for the awful things she's said, then it's worthwhile to her. She walks out of the shop and heads down the street. The rain that had seemed so condemning this morning is almost welcome as it runs down her face. Clichéd as it is, she allows herself to imagine that the rain is washing off everything that had happened all day. And even though she knows that all of her loneliness, guilt and regret is bound to catch up with her in the very near future, Sally feels better than she has since this whole mess started.