How could I have stopped it? Well, not starting it would have been an idea. But then, if it was never started is it technically possible to have stopped it? And if I wasn't going to start it, was it even an idea in the first place and what would the point of stopping it be? Stopped it, yeah, sure, any time I could have stopped it. A million times over, every minute of every day it was in the fecking works I could have stopped it but the point is, and bear with me here, I started it. Right? Following? I started it so why on this side of hell or any other would I ever have stopped it?

See, I'm not like you. I don't have to know you to say with confidence that I am not like you. I don't change my mind once I've started something, because I don't start it until I'm sure. You don't even notice, do you, the way you go cannonballing about your life, firing into one thing and lurching from one idiocy to the next, when if you'd just stand back and look at it first, none of that would happen. Wars could be averted. Famines. Great atrocities. I'm pretty well certain, in fact, that if humanity would behave with a bit of sense, natural disasters might just not happen. We could bring balance to the world, if you were all just a little more like me.

But you're not like me. That's why it seems like a smart and sensible question, to ask me if I could have put a stop to all this at some stage. Because you presume that stopping it was ever a possibility. Because you're human, and you think like that, and it makes you weak.

Stop it? I could have not started it. But then again, that wasn't really an option either. After the last big game? After that awful draw, after having to walk away and I was so ready for him to just do it, whether Moran was going to shoot him or not, to hell with it, I'd brought him there, Nureyev had never danced better for me, I'd done it, yeah, fine, let him shoot and it all goes up and then to have to walk away… Oh God. Oh, no. No. There was no leaving it there.

Can you understand that? Sometimes I have trouble gauging it. I know there's a lot of things that happen one way in my head and another in everybody else's. Sometimes I can't tell which way it is. Can you understand there was no stopping at that stage?

That bloody pool. I thought it was in my clothes or my hair or something, but I could smell chlorine for weeks. Psychosomatic, probably. Everybody somebody mentions it I can smell that sharp, cloying disinfectant bloody smell, it haunted me. There was no stopping there. If I left it at the pool I'd be leaving myself there, forever. It all just stopped. Everything just stopped. No matter what I did, I felt like I was still standing there. So really, when you think about it, not starting wasn't an option either. It was already started. So how could I have stopped it?

Well, to go back another stage, I suppose I didn't necessarily have to blow up his neighbours. But then again…

Do you remember when you were a kid, and it depends on your era what they were, but you'd have some sort of trading card craze happened at some point or another? Of course you do. Everybody lived through one of these. So you'd be buying your packets one day and start unwrapping, and all of a sudden, boom (pardon the pun), there she is, gorgeous, beautiful, and liable to be printed on foil, that card. The one nobody dared to dream of. Now, it's going to get nicked if you just go flashing it around everywhere, the world and his wife are going to grab at it and destroy it and tear it apart. You only tell your mates. The ones that are going to get it.

Bear with me. I don't do insane memory lane rambles unless there's a point.

The Greenwich job, or whatever he called it, that was really about putting five pre-existing jobs out on the line for him to solve. So far so obvious but ask yourself, sincerely, why would I leave myself open like that? Don't you get it? Please.

When I explain this, if it doesn't make immediate and complete sense to you, I am going to cut out your heart and use it for chamois, is that in any way unclear? Good.

Nobody else was ever going to solve those five… cases. They were too good for Scotland Yard. I'd been bored with those boys a long lot of years before Holmes, and with the spooks a long while before that. It was a mark of mutual respect; nobody else was ever going to solve them, and nobody was ever going to amuse him like I could. Holmes had been weighed and measured by then, and found to be about right. I tested him before I gave it to him. Never did a thing until I was sure. But him and me, for both our sakes, it had to be done.

So we've sorted that out then. His timely demise at the hospital was unavoidable, as was the initial incident which made it so, so where do we go from here?

Suppose, if you're going to be really pedantic about it, I never had to pick on him in the first place, did I? All this business about recognition and mutual respect and having to finish it, the one thing that means none of it could have happened, is if there was no Sherlock at all, don't you think? That seems logical, yes? That follows on nicely?

I am not like you. You're not thinking. I never stop thinking. That's why I work so hard, that's why I'm so good at everything I do, that's why I fecking win all the time, okay? I never stop. And I am so fecking jealous of you sweet, naïve, mindless, celebrity-chasing, soap-watching, comfortably-frigging-numb shower of sheep, because you don't know how awful you are. You don't care. You haven't the capacity to look at yourselves and think, 'Dear sweet Jesus, this is a waste of oxygen…" You're jealous of me because I'm switched on, but right back at you, folks, because I can't switch myself off.

There could never be any point in asking if you know what that's like. That's the point we were just discussing. And if I say it's like hell, you'll be thinking of lakes of fire and a man with a tail. That's not it. Hell is banging screaming on the door even after you're sure there's nobody in there.

You don't get this. He got this. Day one, minute one, and his first sniff of me, while the details are my own comforting secret, was a long time before the first breath of my name. I had been watching, and I knew, he got this. Nobody else ever had, likely nobody else ever will. That's why I couldn't just let him slide away. I needed somebody to recognize it and say, no, you're not gone mad. Or, at least, you're not the only one gone mad the same way. And I wanted to say it to him.

They say, don't they, that the difference between an enemy and a nemesis is that a nemesis could just as easily have been your closest friend. Wasn't my fault he turned out to be on the wrong side, or that I only ever even found out about him because of who his brother was. That's another reason it was all so bloody inevitable. But then again, he's a man in mourning and it's not fair to drag him into this. Suffice to say there's a whole other story there and it's another reason. It's the reason me and Sherlock could ever even have caught the faintest traces of each other so…

Stopped it? No, now that I'm thinking about it. We'd be going back a long, long time to have ever had a chance of ever stopping that. I'm sorry to disappoint, but not me, no.


[By popular demand, there he was. Starting work on some of the others now, and still very definitely taking anybody's suggestions. Lots of hearts, thanks for the interest, Sal.]