John stood just outside the open door of Mrs. Hudson's flat, leaning against the wall behind, arms folded. An adapted kind of parade rest. Neither of them spoke for a full minute.
"Yeah, you know what," John finally said hoarsely, rubbing one side of his stubbly jaw. "I have no idea what to do now."
Sherlock opened his mouth to remind John that he was a former career soldier and a current bloody doctor who regularly investigated homicides. It was completely absurd that he didn't know what to do. Clearly, they should...
He had no idea what to do either. Mrs. Hudson was beyond a doctor's help, and the police were only brought in for a suspicious death. This wasn't one. Her front door had been locked and he'd found her in bed, as if sleeping. No sign of violence or any hint of foul play.
"What happened?" John asked.
Sherlock stirred and tried to connect the morning's events into some semblance of chronological order. "Violin," he said flatly. "I was thinking. Normally Mrs. Hudson objects to my playing this early, either by coming up to the flat or hitting a broom on her kitchen ceiling. She didn't this time. I thought this odd. I shouted. She didn't answer. I came down and knocked. Then I opened the door with the key and came in. Tried shaking her. Unsuccessful." He cleared his throat twice. "Checked her pulse. Negative. Then I called you."
"Right." John uncrossed his arms and swallowed heavily, as if forcing himself into action. "Uh, look. Stay there, okay?"
John disappeared back into Mrs. Hudson's flat; after a minute or two his voice floated out from behind the door. Sherlock wondered if he'd lost his grip on the reality that Mrs Hudson is dead and was... talking to her. After a second or two, he dismissed the idea. He was on the phone, notifying Mrs. Hudson's family. Notifying Anne.
Sherlock didn't even know what the woman's surname was. He had never thought to ask, because he didn't care. Mrs. Hudson had rarely mentioned her sister. She lived somewhere in Hertfordshire and rarely came over, except for Christmas and the odd foray into what Mrs. Hudson referred to as "sisterly time." She was Mrs. Hudson's closest living relative.
A hesitant little squeak interrupted his thoughts. Sherlock startled, looking up to where Smudge stood dithering in the doorway of the flat as only a cat can. She blinked at him with her huge orange eyes.
He stared back at her, just as immovable.
After a few seconds of this stand-off, Smudge padded forward daintily and nosed the smashed mobile phone near Sherlock's feet. Sherlock looked down at it, wondering whose phone it was, and what had broken it. A mystery that could wait.
He stood up slowly, limbs aching as if he'd just run a marathon through concrete. Hand splayed against the wall for support, he made it to the foot of the stairs and then mounted them, climbing one at a time, gripping the rail with white knuckles.
Reaching the landing, he stood for a second stood in the doorway of 221B. The flat was exactly the same as he'd left it, even though the entire world beyond it had changed. He glanced over at where he'd casually thunked the Stradivarius down on the sofa just seconds before he'd got up to see why Mrs. Hudson's flat was a dead calm in the middle of Pisendel's Sonata in A Minor, a piece she didn't much care for in broad daylight. When he'd last held that violin, he thought, his worst problem had been trying to work out exactly how he was going to mount a case of attempted murder against Harry Price. Mrs Hudson had been alive...
But she hadn't been alive, and Sherlock didn't need a coroner to confirm that. She'd been lying dead in her bed, approximately underneath his hall floor. She'd died on her own, and she'd been lying dead on her own for about two hours while he drank tea and played the violin and muttered to himself and smoked three cigarettes.
He shuffled over to the medicine cabinet, opening it and blinking stupidly at the contents for what felt like half an hour. Finally, he pulled out the generic-looking white packet of painkillers he hated so much. Well, he was in pain now. And more than that, he knew for a fact that these things turned his brain into a conglomeration of cotton wool. He didn't want to think just now, about Mrs. Hudson or John or anything else.
He swallowed four of them without water and stumbled down the corridor toward his bedroom.
~~o0o~~
Sherlock had no recollection later of even getting to the bed. He was next aware of John shaking him, fingers digging into the tender part of his shoulder. His voice seemed to come from a long way away, like the end of a football field or a hundred leagues under the sea.
"Sit up, mate," he was saying, gently pulling him upright. The cotton wool in Sherlock's head threw his centre of gravity off, and his head lolled forward. John patted his cheek lightly, then put something smooth in his hand and curled his fingers around it. Heat bloomed underneath his fingertips.
"What's this...?"
"Just tea."
John's tones were factual and unaccusing, but Sherlock burned with resentment that he couldn't smell tea from coffee when it was in his bloody hand and somehow, this was all Mrs. Hudson's fault for dying. He sipped patiently, but he couldn't have tasted tea from drain cleaner just then.
Probably for the best. John made a frankly awful cup of tea, and always had. Sherlock had been suffering through what could barely be called "tea" courtesy of John Watson from the day five years and six months before, when he'd first moved in. Brand indiscriminate. Tea bag. Cold mug. Tea first. Ghastly. Sherlock strongly suspected that John's first foray into making tea had either been as a bachelor at university or during his first tour of duty, and that either way the emphasis had been on "hot" and "caffeine" and not "drinkable". He glanced down at the contents of the mug, murky as the bottom of a loch. Another sip. Still no taste.
A burst of cheerful spring breeze fluffed out the bedroom curtain, just as if nothing was the matter, nothing was wrong, nothing had changed. Somewhere on the stairs, Smudge meowed plaintively. Where was everyone? And why hadn't anyone fed her yet?
~~o0o~~
Molly and Charlie were the first to arrive.
Anne would take much longer, Sherlock surmised, making himself get up from the bed and put one foot in front of the other until he was in the kitchen. Molly stood near the table, Charlie in one arm, the other around John. She was nuzzled into his chest and Sherlock, in a moment of illumination, saw...
Was John crying?
Of course, it must have been that he'd seen John cry before... hadn't he? His mind flickered back over their adventures together. Kidnapped by the Tong? John had made a smart remark about a second date with that obnoxiously clever female person who'd managed to get herself kidnapped with him. Bomb vest. Moriarty. Visibly stressed, yes, but he'd managed to keep himself together much better than the others of Moriarty's victims. He'd come closer to tears when they'd had that... disagreement over whether caring about people would help save them. True, John had been distressed when Sherlock had finally pulled him out of the lab experiment at Baskerville, but he hadn't been crying, and he hadn't been crying on the occasion he'd... talked to him... on the roof of Barts, either. He might have been crying on the phone the night after his father's death, but that was difficult to deduce, and Molly would never divulge it as a fact. No need for emotional excesses about the Edalji case or Addie Bartlett...
Yes, there had been a time once. Furtive, angry, shamed tears for a friend he thought had committed suicide, shed in what he'd thought was total solitude.
Sherlock was still standing near the refrigerator, staring, when Molly noticed him. She released John and gently handed an obliviously placid Charlie over to him, and John hoisted her in one arm, swiping the inner corners of his eyes with the other thumb. And then Molly was in Sherlock's arms. Only she wasn't; it took him a few seconds to register that, so much as possible, he was in hers. He lost his balance and swayed backwards, partly because of his fuzzy head and partly because Smudge had come to the flat looking for company and food and had slid up behind his knees. He staggered back a step, feeling Molly's grip on him tighten.
She heaved a sob into his chest.
And looking across at John, Sherlock had no idea if he was meant to be comforting the Watsons, or if they were meant to be comforting him.
~~o0o~~
Greg Lestrade arrived nearly half an hour later, dressed in the sort of shirt and suit combination he wore to work. He was little emotion and all business, telling John what he needed to do from a legal perspective.
"Best not do anything until the sister arrives," he muttered into his chest. "You've got five days to register this, so there's no hurry."
Sherlock gave a brief snort of contempt. 'This.' Lestrade knew better than to use euphemisms like that. And if he said it and kept saying it, over and over, maybe it would start to make sense and seem real. Mrs Hudson is dead.
"But then you'll need to contact the coroner," Lestrade went on. "If she hasn't been under a treating doctor in a while, they may want to..." He paused, waving his hand vaguely. "Yeah."
"Perform an autopsy," Sherlock said bluntly.
"Yeah. Well, I don't know. They might want to. Like I said, that's not something you have to worry about, Sherlock."
I 'don't have to worry about' it? In what universe, Sherlock thought, should he not worry about something like that? He viciously fought off an image of Mrs. Hudson's internal organs being systematically removed, examined, and returned to her like a macabre jigsaw puzzle. From the sofa, at least a mile away, Lestrade was still talking oh God will he just bloody shut up so I can think?
"Do you know if she had any requests about a funeral?" Sherlock heard him ask John next.
"No idea," John said. "We never really talked about it. Maybe it's in her will somewhere."
"Which is where?"
"At the bank, I hope." John sat on the sofa, Charlie on his lap and Molly nestled into one side. She was crying quietly, as Molly did everything; as if she was afraid that making too much noise with her emotions might inconvenience someone. John reached for her hand without looking at her and squeezed it. "She, uh. She said she put a codicil in it when Charlie was born," he said. "She kept it here, at first. I told her. I told her it wasn't really safe like that, and she should put it with someone who'd keep it safe for her, in case the flat burned down..."
Something in Sherlock's head finally capitulated. Standing up, he somehow traversed the great distance to the kitchen, swiping his keys and wallet from where they sat on the table. "Going out," he muttered without meeting anyone's gaze. "Need some air."
"Now?" John stood up.
Sherlock rounded on him. "I want privacy," he snarled.
Perfectly ordinary psychological need, privacy. Logical. Expected. Appropriate for the situation at hand, so far as Sherlock understood such things. But John stood there in front of the sofa for what felt like a long time, looking at Sherlock as if he'd just made one of his not good speeches. Then he swallowed twice.
"I know," he finally said. "But Sherlock, you know you can't wander off on your own. Not when you -"
"John," Molly broke in quietly.
John glanced down at Molly without speaking. Sherlock heard no more objections from him, or from Lestrade, as he made his way around the latter and reached for the living room door. Stumbling down the steps to the street door, he heard the low voices he'd left behind continuing. They were planning a funeral, or an autopsy, or something.
Living room.
How gloriously appropriate.
Without glancing toward the door of Mrs. Hudson's flat, he pulled the street door open and stepped out into the clear, cool spring morning. Then he started walking up toward the station, holding out his hand to hail the first available cab.
