A/N - This is my first Sherlock story and admittedly it sounded a lot better in my head, but I hope you enjoy anyway :) Reviews are appreciated.
Contains spoilers to episode 3, 'The Reichenbach Fall'. This story is set around a year after the episode.
Disclaimer: I do not own 'Sherlock'. If I did then it wouldn't be nearly as well written and Sherlock and John would be a couple by now :D
Sally would have been lying if she said that the last year had been easy for her.
Admittedly, with the absence of Sherlock or Moriarty or whoever the freak had truly been pulling the strings, the cases were often significantly less stressful. Most criminals were caught within a matter of days at most. Sally was rarely called to a challenging case any more, if anything they were often rather simple; textbook domestic murders or a gang related incident that barely took up any of her time and definitely didn't require Lestrade's favourite 'detective' analysing the scene excitedly like a child at Christmas. With no criminal mastermind behind the scenes any more her work had almost become dull, although she discarded that thought when it reminded her of the freak complaining over boring cases.
That wasn't to say there wasn't any difficult cases however. At the beginning there had been little mention of Sherlock at the station, as if he were a bad dream that everyone wanted to go away, and that suited Sally just fine. The police started to believe that they hadn't needed Sherlock's help after all, that they weren't really as inferior as they'd been led to believe.
However occasionally they would be left feeling out of their depth. There was the child serial killer who still roamed the streets, abducting children as they walked home from school and leaving barely any clues except taunting messages to the police. Or there was the burglar who'd managed to break into a millionaire's locked apartment without leaving so much as a fingerprint. No-one could deny the slight gloom that spread throughout the office as these cases dragged on and on, the absence of the so-called 'consulting detective' playing on everyone's mind. Sally knew that Sherlock would probably have determined the criminals entire life story just by spending five minutes at the crime scene.
She almost missed the freak during these cases . For all his arrogance and the fact that he could be a complete bastard to anyone and get away with it, at least he'd solved the cases quickly and it ensured that her job was done almost as soon as it had begun. Not to mention the fact that John's blog and the photos of Sherlock in that hat had always provided a good laugh in the office when it was needed.
However Sally would always return to the conclusion that, like the other cases he had taken delight in solving, Sherlock would probably have been the one behind it all in the first place.
She often wondered how a man so distant from other human beings could have enough contacts to arrange several murders, or bank robberies or even have some power over murderous Chinese smugglers. He must have been an amazing actor, she thought. After all he'd managed to fool Lestrade for years and even John, the only human being who could truly put up with the psychopath hadn't suspected a thing about him.
Sally almost felt pride in the fact that she'd never really trusted him. Hadn't she warned John that solving the crimes would never be enough for Sherlock, that one day they'd arrive at a crime scene and he'd be the one who put the body there? And yet, she was never really in the mood to feel self satisfaction any more. Too much had occurred because of her assumptions that Sherlock was a fraud.
There were times when she actually felt guilt over Sherlock's suicide, as if she were the one who was at fault for everything. Deep down she knew this couldn't be true. She was simply doing her job, she'd had suspicions and she needed to tell others this. She knew that had Sherlock just accepted his arrest rather than thrown himself off a building then she wouldn't have needed to give him a second thought. He would become just another criminal that it was her job to catch and punish and things would be fine. She may have been tempted to taunt him as he was being led into a police car but she knew she was much too professional to start a petty fight in front of so many police officers, especially in that moment.
She wished more than ever that he'd just come quietly now instead of killing himself.
Sally was hardly new to death, she had seen family members, victims in cases and even fellow police officers die before her eyes and every time she had moved on because she had to, or because she had grown used to it.
When she'd started experiencing slight guilt she'd always asked herself why the freak should be any different to the other deaths. She hadn't even liked him that much, nor had anyone for that matter. It wasn't as if he deserved any sympathy, after all those years of deceiving the police and the crimes he was connected to, the fact that anyone mourned him was more than he deserved.
And yet, there was always the knowledge that had Sally not been so suspicious of him, had she not involved Lestrade and the rest of the police, had she not come to the conclusion that he was a fraud then he might still be alive. That was what bothered her. She couldn't shake the fact that somehow, no matter how indirectly, she was responsible for his death.
This had never happened to her before.. During police raids she had sometimes been expected to carry a gun for self defence, but she had never pulled the trigger, much less killed anyone. Not even a criminal. Being responsible for the death of another human being was a burden she had been unwilling to carry, yet it rested in the back of her mind, no matter how stupid she knew that feeling was.
It wasn't like she'd pushed Sherlock off the edge of the hospital. She just happened to be one of many people who'd led him there. And despite the fact that she had fought and bickered with the man at almost every opportunity she knew that she had never hated him enough to want him dead.
Despite this she found herself hating the freak more than ever now thanks to her guilt. It seemed that even when he was dead he had to make life difficult for her.
What plagued her mind more than this though was the doubt. At the time she'd been certain of Sherlock's guilt, and she had had no reason not to be. How else could the little girl have been so terrified of him just by seeing his face, how else could he have deduced the exact whereabouts of the children from a single footprint? The freak had been clever, there was no denying that, but no human could be that clever! His own intelligence had caused him to slip up, he'd made a deduction that was too brilliant and Sally had finally noticed.
The press had also received information that proved he was a fraud and even Lestrade had been forced to cooperate with the others against Sherlock. As for Moriarty, or Richard Brook as he was now known to be called, files had shown that he'd been Sherlock's toy all along, an actor performing the act of a criminal mastermind. The proof was all there. Sally had been right, there was no reason to question this.
A year on though, things seemed less certain. The press had grown tired of the fake detective but suddenly people started to crawl out of the woodwork, putting up posters and spraying graffiti all over London. The slogan 'Sherlock Holmes was not a fake!' was visible on almost every derelict building or street corner. People still believed in the Reichenbach hero.
Others had also come forward to the press or police with their stories of how the detective had solved a seemingly unsolvable crime, in order to try and clear his name. A young man named Chris Melas told of how Sherlock and John had helped him solve a case by fighting a comic book geek while dressed as ninjas. One man called Henry Knight had even come to London from Dartmoor reporting that Sherlock had been able to solve the case that had affected his life for twenty years with help from John and Lestrade, who Henry had greeted like like an old friend when they met. All of these stories were completely ridiculous of course, but in the case of Sherlock Holmes that just made them seem all the more possible.
None of this was helping Sally, it only fuelled the idea that she might have been wrong after all. Even Lestrade was beginning to believe that his friend hadn't really been a fraud, and spent what seemed like every waking hour trying to piece together information to prove this right. Sally wanted to tell him that he was wasting his time but seeing as this was the man who'd helped Sherlock overcome a drug addiction and who despite their differences had practically considered the man his friend, she didn't have the heart to try and stop him any more.
As for John... well Sally had only seen John once since he'd been led away by Sherlock as his 'hostage'.
The meeting had been both coincidental and brief: Sally had been to the cemetery in order to place flowers by her grandfather's grave. Usually it was her mother that came by and did this every week, but she'd been ill and Sally had offered to go instead, craving to get away from the stress of work for an afternoon.
She had been walking to his grave when she'd noticed a familiar face heading towards her. John Watson, the detective's pet, presumably heading back from visiting Sherlock's grave as dried tears were visible on his cheeks. He looked tired, and Sally could hardly blame him. For one cruel moment she almost considered uttering an 'I told you so' to him, or perhaps reminding him that he should have gotten himself a safer hobby rather than following Sherlock Holmes around, but even she couldn't bring herself to be that spiteful.
Instead they acknowledged each other with small nods and a quiet "hello" before continuing on their separate paths. There wasn't room for bitterness between them any more, it was pointless and unnecessary so she silently put to rest any remarks she had considered saying and silently thanked John for not throwing insults at her either. Only later that day as she returned home did she realise with a pang of guilt that John's limp had returned.
She couldn't tell how many times she'd gone over the night she'd gone against Sherlock since seeing John in order to convince herself that she'd done nothing wrong. Seeing how John had been affected only seemed to increase her feelings of doubt. Surely she hadn't let her dislike of Sherlock affect her judgement, had she? Perhaps she'd been so disgusted that somebody could kidnap and poison two young children that she'd started suspecting him purely because he didn't seem to care.
That didn't make sense though. Sherlock had never cared about a case, why should this have been any different? She wouldn't have imagined him caring about any other human being had she not seen him around John or heard from Lestrade that a man who had attacked his landlady, Mrs Hudson, just happened to 'fall' out of a window afterwards. Yet if there was any possibility of her being wrong then why had the child screamed? Why had Sherlock committed suicide? The child would never have seen him before, unless he was connected with their kidnapper, and Sally had known Sherlock well enough to know that whatever the press or anyone else said about him, he didn't care. So long as he believed in his own brilliance nothing else mattered. Sherlock dying because of false stories didn't make any sense to her. He had to have been a fraud, he had to have been against them all along. If she'd been wrong and helped to destroy an innocent man then... no, she didn't even want to think of that possibility.
Sherlock was just a criminal all along, nothing worth wasting her thoughts about any more. It had been a year since then, too long to change anything and no matter how deeply she tried to think about everything the results remained the same. Sherlock was still dead. Moriarty still didn't exist. John was still grieving. Lestrade still tried to deny that his 'friend' of five years had been a fraud.
And Sally still couldn't get that uncomfortable feeling of guilt to go away.
Thanks for reading :) If anyone is interested, the case with Chris Melas can be found on John Watson's blog and is called, 'The Geek Interpreter'.