Don't Make Me Leave You
By Hazelmist
A/N: I wrote Don't Make Me Leave You after "M" and then proceeded to try and edit it. Instead I went back to the beginning and ended up writing this. I couldn't decide what version I liked better and they kind of developed into two mirror images that evolve into opposite outcomes. So the beginning starts out similar and then it kind of branches off into its own little story.
He never thought that this would happen. He goes through it over and over again, wondering at what point he could have let her go. Because no matter how painful it would have been, he thinks that any ending would've been better than this one.
She'd threatened to leave him before.
Once after they first met, he told her that he lied to spare her feelings. And then he told her the ugly truth about the patient that she couldn't save. He only stated a fact he had deduced just by observing her, but she wasn't prepared and it almost shattered her. In that moment, she nearly gave up on him and on herself. Even then, the look on her face and her departure had upset him more than he would have liked to admit. But she came back and he was surprisingly pleased.
She pushed him to be a better man, but he didn't always agree with her methods and sabotaged every attempt. He tried to make her go away with the proposal of a vacation, and continuously referred to her as his personal valet or housekeeper. He sat through the recovering addicts meetings she dragged him to, but he hypnotized himself. He agreed to all kinds of silly things like jogging, but only because he wasn't listening and in the morning he wouldn't remember anything she said. She forced him to pick a sponsor and he specifically chose the one he thought she'd dislike the most. He hired an actor to humiliate her when she was supposed to have dinner with his father, hacked into her email and phone, and crashed dates and family dinners. This went on for weeks, and when the contract's time drew to a close, Sherlock was still drug-free and Joan was still there. He told her he'd done those things because he didn't need her, but she disagreed and told him that it was all because he didn't want her to leave. He laughed at her, but that didn't stop him from trying a short time later to bribe her to stay.
Moran's reappearance in New York changed everything. The killer brought not just death for one innocent man but a storm of bitter memories and a thirst for revenge that threatened to destroy Sherlock. Getting past her after she discovered his dark plans for "M" was one of the hardest things he ever had to do. She had prepared him though, and when "M" walked away with nothing more than a painful but ultimately harmless injury Sherlock still had his sanity, his freedom, and the name of Irene's real killer thanks to her. He had thought she would've left him then, after he finally admitted that he would actually miss her after she was gone, but when he woke the following morning she was still there with a promise to stay.
She never left.
He didn't need to hack into her email to know that his father had never agreed to extend her services. He knew she'd lied but he didn't know why. The days turned into weeks and the weeks into months and still she stayed. She shadowed him, and he trained her, taking her with him everywhere as he honed those deductive reasoning skills that showed so much promise. But he quickly learned that there was much that she could teach him as well. She seemed to be instrumental in solving every case, always piecing something together or forcing him to look at something from a different angle. She was brilliant and constantly surprising him with what she could do. Gradually, he grew to rely on her as more than just a student, a listener and someone who kept him company and picked up after him. But it wasn't until his father "exposed" Joan and tried to force her to leave that Sherlock realized the extent to which she'd become a permanent fixture in his life.
That was the first time he ever told his father sober to piss off. It felt wonderful, but Sherlock took it a step further by telling him that he intended to shack up with the "help" as his father condescendingly called her for many more years. He would never forget the look on his father's face. Nothing, he could've said could've angered him more.
The glorious victory was short-lived though, when Joan Watson managed to drag him out of the restaurant after their very public and embarrassing row.
She'd threatened again to leave him now that she'd been officially exposed as a liar. He almost rolled his eyes for the assumption that he'd be stupid enough not to have surmised it himself after all these additional months.
"Don't be silly, Watson, you have to stay. I just told my father that I intend to shack up with the housekeeper for as long as I please and it wouldn't do us any good if you were to go and leave me now and give him exactly what he wants. The kitchen's a mess, by the way, and I wonder if now that we're officially "shacking up" if we should consider a shag or two now and then…"
She slapped him so hard that he saw stars. She told him she had half a mind to pack her bags right then and there. He tried to make her see that his offer was a considerable compliment, coming from him, but when he woke up on the floor the next morning with a "considerable" lump on the back of his head, he realized that it was going to take a little bit more than that to get an incredible woman like Joan Watson to stay.
It took him a fortnight and a trip more than halfway across the country, but when she finally agreed to hear him out he told her what she needed to hear. Six words were more than sufficient.
"I miss you. Please, come home."
"You didn't have to come," she told him when it was all said and done and she realized that he'd flown there and he was offering to fly them both back, despite his fears.
"Yes, I did."
He held out his hand and she passed him the suitcase. Their hands brushed and she held on, refusing to relinquish her grip on him or the suitcase. Her hand was warm, but the heat of her gaze was searing.
"Don't make me leave you again, because next time I leave you, I won't come back," she warned him.
He swallowed and nodded, realizing that letting her leave him again wasn't an option. The fortnight without her had been so agonizing that he didn't even have the heart to tell her that his fear of flying had been surpassed and demolished by the fear of losing her.
He shocked them both when he dropped her suitcase and pulled her toward him instead.
Now, he would make sure that she stayed.
There were some things though that were out of his power. His personality, his work, and his superior intelligence had a way of getting under anyone's skin and Joan was no exception. She threatened to leave him many more times, just because he was driving her mad. But even those forces could never quite sway her. She enjoyed the job and his company just as much as he did hers. Something greater than himself came between them to make her leave.
And on one cold November morning, something did come between them.
Sherlock gazed out on what had once been his beloved city for the last time. His hands were moving on their own accord, following the instructions on autopilot as his brain cycled through a dizzying plethora of options searching for anything that might save him from this fate. But his mind kept circling back to one thing: Watson. There were hundreds of times when he had texted her, called her, begged her, bribed her, and once when he flew halfway across the country just to get her back by his side. But as he turned his back on the city and faced his enemy, he wished that for once in her life she would stay away from him.
But Joan Watson was a force to be reckoned with, and she rarely ceased to amaze him.
No sooner had Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes, for what should have been the last time, when he heard the sound of her voice. Sherlock had only a moment to open his eyes and recognize the woman racing toward them, before Moriarty refocused his attention. Too late, Sherlock realized. He kicked out at Moriarty, knocking him off his feet. It gave Watson enough time to come in close enough to aim the gun she'd somehow acquired, and Sherlock to begin the painful process of freeing his tied bloodied hands. But Watson was more concerned with Sherlock than Moriarty.
"Sherlock! You're bleeding!"
He saw what was going to happen, before it unfolded and all he could do was cry out helplessly as it all unraveled before him.
"Watson, move!"
Moriarty shot her, a split second before Sherlock seized her gun and managed to end the life of the world's greatest criminal mastermind. The game was finished and he had won, but at what cost?
As he took her in his arms, he realized that he was the loser. First Moriarty had taken Irene, and now he was going to take his dear Watson from him as well.
"Your hands, they'll have to amputate the left one if you don't wrap it," Watson informed him drowsily as she threatened to sink into a sleep he knew he couldn't wake her from. He had the insane urge to laugh.
Instead he hushed her, but she sighed, "I love your hands. You know that, right?" Something unpleasant churned in his stomach as he harshly told her to stop talking and save her strength.
"I don't know why I love you, but I do. I always have," she whispered, coughing up an amount of blood that frightened him. Her grip on his hands slackened as her eyes slid shut, her whole body relaxing in his arms. He had dreamt of this so many times before, but not like this, no, never like this. He called her name, but she didn't respond. He staggered beneath the weight of it all, and a blinding sense of panic and fear seized him.
"Please, don't leave me," he begged her. Her eyelids fluttered, and he pressed his lips to hers in a foolish, desperate kiss. "My dear Watson," he murmured, cradling her head, "I don't want you to go."
"I know."
She opened her eyes and smiled at him. And it was only then that he realized how much he loved her. But it was too late.
She'd threatened to leave him many times before, but when she finally did leave him it wasn't at all in the manner that he'd expected, even though she'd warned him once before.
She left the hospital two days later in a box.
They found him in the morgue with his head in his hands.
"My dear Watson," he wept. "I'm so sorry."
He never thought she'd be the one to leave him, but in the end she leaves him, just like everyone else. As he stands in front of her grave, in his mind he can see every single time she threatened to leave him and every single time he should have let her go. He selfishly clung to her because she loved him right from the start. And now he knows that he loved her too, but he hadn't realized it until the end. Perhaps if he had known it earlier, he would have loved her enough to let her go…
But would she really have left him?
He thinks of every time she saved his life, and the last image of her racing toward him, bold, brave and fearless, burns into his brain like a brand that he'll never be able to not see when he closes his eyes. No, she never would have left him, even if he had had the strength to push her away.
He bends down and adds an orchid to the grave.
Then he turns her back on her for the last time and walks away. He leaves New York City behind just like he left London. But while Irene's death had destroyed him, Watson's death restores him in a way that surprises him. Moriarty may be dead, but there are still many more strands of his web that need to be followed and this time, with everything he learned from Watson, he'll be able to keep going.
At the gates to the cemetery, a sharply dressed woman waits for him, sitting in the driver's seat of a parked unmarked black SUV.
Sherlock walks right up to the car and leans in through the window, startling the woman, even though it was rather obvious she'd been watching him.
"Agent Lestrade, I presume?" he inquires, but he recognizes her from the news and he'd done his research.
"Sherlock Holmes," she answers.
She folds up the newspaper she'd been pretending to read and he slides into the passenger seat as she unlocks the door for him.
"I heard about your partner, Joan Watson," she says hesitantly, as she turns the key in the ignition. "I could tell you how sorry I am, but it's never enough."
Sherlock sucks in a breath and nods. Joan Watson had been so much more than his partner and even the mention of her name physically hurts him.
"My partner got shot seven months ago and she died saving my life too." Her dark eyes burn in her sallow face as she turns toward him, and Sherlock wonders if perhaps she truly does know what he's going through. Perhaps they have a lot more in common than he had hoped.
"Let's make sure the bastards pay for what they did to them and all those other poor souls, yeah?"
"I intend to," Sherlock vows.
She pulls out of the cemetery, heading for the airport. And even though he told himself he wouldn't look back, Sherlock watches in the mirror until the cemetery his dear Watson is buried in, fades from view.
A/N: The End. Yeah, so like the first part, I'm twisting canon a bit. I can't remember if Lestrade was introduced as Sherlock's previous "boss/contact" in Scotland Yard in one of the earlier episodes, but whatever, we can make it AU or pretend that this Lestrade is a relative or wholly unrelated. I wanted to introduce her in my own way. Also, I failed to mention this in the first part, but I'm operating under a speculation that Mycroft Holmes, instead of Sherlock's brother will end up taking on the form of his father. Please review and tell me what you think! I promise my next Elementary fanfic will be much happier!
