221 Baker Street was a lonely place without Sherlock and John.
She didn't want to admit it, she didn't want to think on it, but she found it strange to have slept properly for an entire week, not awoken by gunshots or violin-playing or some other more unidentifiable noise. It was odd to be able to make tea without hearing the scratchy noise of a bow not quite gliding across the strings, eking out something that she had no word for, a wavering, horrid tuneless thing that came and went with Sherlock's thoughts...
She had never liked that sound. She had wished he would play properly. But now she would give all she had to hear anything but the terrible sound of silence.
She remembered hearing about it. That fateful day when her phone had rung – why had she chosen her favourite song for the ringtone? She would never be able to listen to it again – and told her the news, the awful news that even her nightmares had never managed to match.
He was gone.
It was strange, because so many times she had believed him dead, or thought he would get himself killed, in that dangerous job of his, those madcap escapades he went on. He got kicks from peril and he never recoiled from the face of death itself. Yet until now he had managed to avoid it. She had thought him lucky, immensely lucky.
Well, the luck had to run out one day.
She had known a lot of people pass away. She wouldn't have called herself old, but she was, and nowadays it wasn't quite that people were dying before her, it was more that she was outliving them.
Sherlock had been young though.
Too young.
Who, not knowing him, could have looked into those naïve eyes, that almost-angelic face and said that it hid anything more than a child?
Far too young.
Over and over she told herself that she knew it would happen eventually. It was a horrid thought to have, but not an unfounded one. More than once she had awoken shuddering after seeing him killed at the hands of some dastardly masked villain. A gun, a bullet, a gasp –
She had never imagined that he would kill himself.
She had never understood him, and now she never would.
Mrs Hudson was a rational woman, but it was hard to listen to reason in those dark times. She mourned, of course, and accepted that he was gone; but she knew that she could not go like John. Dear John Watson – Sherlock's best friend, undoubtedly, now nothing but a shell.
John returned to Baker Street only to move out. He was quiet, subdued, his grief bordering on madness, reserving a few words only for his most intimate friends, none for anyone else. He wasn't coming back, he couldn't bear to; he took his things and went – somewhere; he didn't say where.
And she missed him. His goodbye had been a handshake, his parting words some murmur that she hadn't managed to catch. She missed him being smiling and friendly, she missed drinking tea with him, she missed that satisfying normality that was so different from Sherlock's eccentricity. It broke her heart to see that smile downturned, that voice of reason turned to a whisper that betrayed his brokenness. She missed Sherlock. But, if anything, she missed John Watson more.
They had stood by the grave, that minimalistic monument that somehow spoke volumes, and reminisced; and she had left him to speak to Sherlock, the only person he wanted to speak to. The old John Watson, so bubbly, so friendly, had faded with Sherlock.
But of course Sherlock did not fade. His name survived, became more prominent, more infamous. Apparently he had claimed to be a fake. Ha! Well, that was ridiculous. Sherlock had been a genius, he couldn't have faked that. The tabloids and even the broadsheets had picked up the story scarily quickly, trying to claim that they had "always known" – but how could they have always known something that just wasn't true?
John and Mrs Hudson had been close to Sherlock – the closest, perhaps – and they were adamant that the story was untrue, despite the evidence to the contrary. They knew Sherlock – they knew he was a genius! Wasn't he? How was it thinkable, nay possible, that –
Mrs Hudson was left the job of what to do with 221B. John had taken his things but not dared to move any of Sherlock's. Mrs Hudson, being Mrs Hudson, tidied and scrubbed the kitchen thoroughly, but could not bear to touch anything in the living-room. It became a time-capsule, a memorial more poignant, perhaps, than anything a stone-worker could have managed.
The chairs. Sherlock's chair. The coffee-table, still with a mug on it (empty, of course – she would have washed one that still had anything in it). His laptop. Paper, books, folders. Ornaments and photographs that had presumably meant something to him. The mirror above the mantelpiece – she looked into it, and almost hoped that she would see a sprawl of dark hair behind her, hear that voice that she loved and hated all at once.
She didn't even wipe away the small smear of something on the corner of the mirror, much as it irritated her. She didn't brush the dust from the books on the bookshelf. She didn't put the Encyclopaedia Britannica back into alphabetical order. She didn't touch anything, she just – stood.
Remembered.
Then she turned away, closed the door quietly, locked it. Leaned against it for a moment. With her ear to the wood as if listening... She shook her head, smiling sadly, and padded back down the stairs to her own flat. There was still something of Sherlock left in the house – he would never be gone, not whilst his memory lived on in that flat, in John, in her.
She would miss him. She missed him. She couldn't imagine what would keep her going now that her life was, well, back to normal. But she wouldn't let his memory fade. She wouldn't forget him, what he had done for her, for John. And most of all, she wouldn't lose faith.