He barely remembered taking the coffin to bits. But there were shattered pieces of it everywhere when John stepped up and forced his focus again. They had to keep going. They had to soldier on. Only now, Sherlock was feeling a bit reckless. Murmuring in the back of his mind was a single, dangerous phrase, "What does it matter."
And as the next game was revealed, Sherlock had to wonder if Eurus was genius enough to truly understand exactly how precarious enough he was in the moment and had set this stage for him or if fate was in fact real and offering him a friendly hand. Choose? Choose between Mycroft or John? It was rather laughable. Though he had to applaud Mycroft. He truly hadn't expected his big brother to be so self sacrificing. Though he supposed it was how their idiot uncle had managed to rope Mycroft into this mess in the first place.
It wasn't nearly as difficult to turn the gun on himself as he'd thought it would be. Perhaps he and Moriarty really weren't that different. Distantly, he could hear his sister's confused upset, could hear her trying to bargain with him, could hear her trying to keep his interest. But he wasn't in the moment any more. He was in a little cake shop, his body aching and cramping and dizzy from withdrawal; his best friend at his side, chuckling and smiling at his daughter; his goddaughter somehow already completely covered in strawberry icing and chocolate cake, flailing her arms in delight and smacking her lips for more; and the woman he loved giggling through her dismay as she tried futilely to clean little Rosie up, chatting happily, keeping at bay the grey clouds that threatened them constantly these days.
He'd made promises to Molly—or rather, to himself about his treatment of Molly. But he didn't deserve the comfort they'd offer him. He deserved this. No, he deserved worse than this. But he wasn't going to kill his friend and he wasn't going to kill his brother. He felt considerably less troubled with the whole situation once the gun was tucked under his own chin.
Only, instead of the squeeze of a trigger followed by nothing, there was a sharp pinch at the back of his neck followed by a spinning of the world as he slowly faded from it. He woke to an all over body ache, the all too familiar feeling of having been drugged, and the now familiar voice of the little girl on the plane calling out into his ear.
John is crying out. The girl is crying out. Eurus is singing the unsolvable riddle. It's chaos in his head but there's something human in Eurus now. He saw a flash of it after Molly—a brief twist of her features into something almost sad. It's been growing in the hours they've been out. And maybe—maybe that's where his hope lays. Not with winning games and cold logic, but with humanity.
And even with the pain, the brutal, deep pain he's always felt but never understood until the name long forgotten comes to his lips again: Victor Trevor—Sherlock believes now more than ever that it is the humanity in the Holmes that will save them. Not their brilliant brains, but their fragile little hearts. He can't save Redbeard. But he can save John Watson. He can save the little girl on the plane. He can save his sister.
It's strange going home afterwards—not that he's really going home. 221B is still blown to bits and Sherlock's arrange accommodations can hardly be called "home" no matter how nice Mycroft's made them. Sherlock can't reconcile the insanity and terror of the night and the sudden world of new memories—old memories, in point of fact—that are filling his head with the utter sameness of the London streets around him. Sherlock's entire existence has been altered beyond his own recognition and yet the world is… exactly as he left it. His feet take him to Baker Street where he wanders through the ruble. It's a wonder there's still so much of the flat left. He picks mindlessly though the pieces of it, vaguely mourning the loss of some books, some samples, some bits of sentiment.
Something crunches underfoot; glass. Carefully he steps back and finds a damaged slide, the glass scorched in places now broken completely under his heel. It's one of a few that've spilled from a very familiar over turned box of slides. He's frozen solid for a long minute before he kneels down and, for the first time, attempts to recover something from the wreckage of his home.
The wooden box had been plain but sturdy, made of a lovely, warm cherry wood. The wood was scorched quite badly on one side, a dovetailed corner cracked open, the dovetail having snapped off and lost among the rubble. The metal joints that held the lid had ripped from the bottom of the box and clung to the nearby flung lid on tenuous nails, their metal well mangled and unlikely to be easily repaired. He lifted the lid from the ash and debris with care, turning it over to find the slide index tucked into the underside of it was nearly completely turned to ash. All that remained legible was the simply printed "Index" in pail red at the top of the card and a few letters in Molly Hooper's familiar hand for the first three entries.
He closed his eyes and bowed his head, inexplicably heart broken at the sight of only a few vowels and a single "p" that remained. Gently, he set it aside in a relatively clear portion of the floor before turning his attention to the box itself. It was upended, some of the slides still tucked (hopefully) safely inside while others were partially falling out and a few others (including the one he'd so carelessly stepped on) were flung free of the box and any protection it might have offered from the explosion. He fretted for a few moments, terrified of doing more damage in trying to move it before he finally unwrapped his scarf and used it to gently attempt to ease the delicate slides that had partially fallen from safety back into the lined cherry wood slots and then carefully, carefully turn the box back over—his heart giving a little jerk of fear when the slides all at once slid fully back into the slots with a collective "thunk." He tried to salvage the ones that had not been offered the protection of the box but it was a lost cause. He spent hours and hours fretting over the slides until, finally, he had to admit that of the thirty five slides, eight were unsalvageable and eleven were quite seriously damaged. When he finally had to hang his head in defeat, had to accept the Christmas gift of wonderfully rare and strange slides painstakingly created by Molly Hooper specifically for him—a gift he hadn't even bothered to open until some time after he'd returned from the dead—had been so badly damaged, seemed so beyond repair, so carelessly ruined by one single act of irreverent cruelty; he cried. Alone in the kitchen/lab of 221B, Sherlock Holmes hung his head and sob in agonized defeat.
He remembered vividly the night Molly had given it to him. Remembered the cold water shock when he'd opened the card to find not some boring name of some boring man (his money was on someone from work—Molly hardly got out enough to find a love interest elsewhere) but his own name staring innocently back at him. Not just his own name, not just a card labeled with a name meant to identify the recipient, either. She had given him a beautifully, crushingly sincere title.
Dearest Sherlock
And it had sucked the breathe from him. Had physically drawn him back. Such gentle hand writing. Such kind words. Such… perfect Molly-ness. Simple. Sweet. Sincere. And he had thrown it in her face. He'd tried to apologize but he had a case on and he couldn't face the rapidly growing shame of his own actions. He had abandoned the red box as quickly as he could, grateful for the distraction Adler offered with such perfect timing. When he returned to the party to appease an insistent Hudders, he barely caught the tail end of Molly's ridiculously large coat slipping out the door. There was hardly an acknowledgment of her leaving, hardly a ripple in the pond of their social circle. He was not quite prepared to see her again so soon, certainly not prepared to face seeing first hand the fall out of his words. That was the beauty of being Sherlock Holmes—he very rarely had to face the consequences of his actions.
It did not help that for some reason, he felt almost violently uncomfortable with Molly and Irene in the same room together—even if one of them was dead. The urge to babble—to explain (what, exactly, he needed to explain, he hadn't the foggiest) was ridiculous. But there it was, along with chalkboard writing and arrows to every little sign of Molly's quiet distress.
Hair that was normally kept up at work and had been curled and teased into something she'd mistakenly thought as fashionable for the party was now down. Simply down. She had taken out the little Christmas cheer bow (he knew Molly secretly loved putting bows in her hair—the bigger the better), had taken down the little bumpette meant to give her hair more volume, brushed out the waves and curls and simply… left it. Her little black dress was gone, replaced with comfortably warm slacks and a Christmas jumper—a relic from before either Mr. Hooper had passed or Mrs. Hooper had become equally dead or distant (it was jarring to realize he didn't actually know despite how many years he'd known her). It was an attempt to comfort herself, an attempt that didn't appear to be working all that well. All added it, it was not a practical thing—not a transformation from party attire to work attire, this was simply… how Molly Hooper was spending her Christmas. Alone. With the dead.
And still, she was courteous, thoughtful; warned him before she revealed the disfigured visage of Adler. And she was right. It was difficult. Nearly impossible, actually. Similar hair color, similar cosmetics. He hated asking it, he hated doing this to her, another blow so soon after—well, after . But he had to know. He had to be sure.
He didn't open her present that Christmas or the next or the next. He rather forgot about the gift itself (the events of that Christmas would not agree to deletion, no matter how hard he tried some nights), until he'd been throwing a particularly rambunctious fit of boredom after his return from the dead and while just about destroying his closet and all it held, he spotted the flash of dull, faded red in the corner. It had stilled him for a beat before he'd set to examining it, reading its journey.
By the partial fading of the paper, it had been exposed to partial sunlight for quite some time: It had remained exactly where he'd left it until after his death. Mrs. Hudson had likely been the one to move it while she was trying to tidy the place up. The paper was crumpled, the folds coming undone and the tape growing a bit brittle. Most telling of all was the thick layer of dust covering it. The distribution told him it had collected dust evenly across the top for some time—likely while it remained unmoved while he was still alive—before it had been tossed a bit carelessly—likely fell out of a storage box, lost behind things, sat on its side at an angle—where he'd found it, collecting dust on the top corner and sides. He gave a puff of breathe to dislodge the accumulation but it did little good, most stubbornly stuck to the paper it had spent the last two and a half years. He dared not open the card again, did not want to see that vivid and unpleasant reminder—especially not now that "quite a lot of sex" Tom was in the picture—but he took great care in opening the long over due gift. He was not at all sure what to make of the plain cherry wood box with the card lain carefully on top.
When Mrs. Hudson came to check on him (the only thing more worrying than a noisy man-child was a silent man-child), she found him glued to his microscope, box of slides open at his side. When she'd questioned him if he needed anything, he'd barely managed a grunt and Martha decided that was as good a sign as any that Sherlock had finally found something to occupy himself with.
He barely remembered the contents of the card now—there had been a rather terrible riddle (it had actually been less riddle and more atrocious puns, god the woman simply could not resist them) meant to let him know the seemingly blank index card actually bore some invisible ink—but he did remember it had been a challenge, something to stave off the boredom for a time, solve the slides and prove your right with a bit of heat—but if you get it wrong and owe Molly Hooper some ambiguous favor. And he remembered the heaviness of those first two words repeated again:
Dearest Sherlock
He'd not yet been able to identify them all—would never be able to identify them all now. He hadn't put the card to heat, either. It wasn't an adrenaline junky's puzzle like Moriarty or The Woman had offered him. It wasn't life or death balanced on a knife. But it was intriguing and in the days he was tempted to pull out his hair or put a needle in his arm, he'd found it easy to drown in those slides instead. They were tricky, foreign, obscure. They required his full attention, required his mind to work at its best.
And now they were burnt and broken and he could not stop drawing parallels between Molly Hooper these beautiful slides, neglected but always there when he needed them, put away when he didn't, forgotten in the rush of the game, in the excitement of the chase, these precious things he had neither taken the time to truly enjoy nor been able to save from disaster, these mysteries and moments he would never get back; broken beyond repair.
He knocked when he arrived at Molly's door; perhaps the first time he'd ever actually knocked on her door. He couldn't quite remember actually deciding to come to Molly's but he was here now and he needed to see her. Needed to know she was alive and well and that they would survive this. Together. But he would do it on her terms for once. He did not have the right to let himself into her home. He had done enough. He knocked again, louder this time, called with a broken voice to let her know who it was—though once he'd announced himself he wasn't sure if knowing who was standing on her front stoop would make her fear him more or less.
No answer came. No signs of life. And no wonder. It was nearly three in the morning. He turned from the door, unsure what to do or where to go. He should go back to his temporary living space. He should get some rest—tackle this in the morning at least slightly rested, perhaps with a bit of food in him. But he couldn't leave. He needed to see her, he needed to breath her in, to be surrounded by the smells of lemon and cat and chemicals. He fumbled with his keys, osculating before her door in indecision. He needed Molly, but Molly might not need him—might need him to stay away.
But Sherlock was never really one for great self control. His key—the one she'd given him after she bought new locks and reminded him that every time he picked her lock, he made it easier for someone else to pick it—still worked and though it had been less than twenty four hours since that phone call, he was still rather surprised. He slipped into the warmth of Molly Hooper's home, though he noted it was several degrees cooler than she usually kept it, locking the door behind himself as he slipped off his shoes. He didn't turn on the lights as he moved through the little house, he knew the place by heart. He called softly to Molly in the dark as he neared her room, not wanting to frighten her for once. But when he finally pushed open the door, he found not a sleeping Molly, hair tousled, jimjams rumpled, lips lax in deep sleep, but an empty, well made bed.
Quickly, he turned on the light, took in the entire room, made it tell him all it could of Molly Hooper, made it reassure him that she was safe and sound and not kidnapped or dead in another room. She hadn't been sleeping here often but there were no signs of a romantic relationship to account for her regular absence. She had been packing a bag regularly—a small duffle or gym bag of some sort, perhaps an overnight bag for wherever it was she must be sleeping now—judging by the impression in the carpet by her dresser. She had the bag with her now, obviously. A quick scan through her closet and drawers revealed she'd packed enough for two days. He wandered through her house, startled to realize just how much of Molly Hooper's life he'd been missing.
At the desk that had once housed medical journals, theories and experiments she had floating about her head, ideas for papers, observations that niggled at her curiosity, stacks and stacks of notes and ongoing studies she was waiting to publish or peer review; there was now a completely different kind of meticulously organized chaos. On the wall where there had once been a cork board full of a thousand different color post its with the occasionally interesting pictures of decaying flesh, there was now only one massive calendar. Rosie's pediatric appoints, sitter schedule, and social outings. John's therapy appointments accompanied by notes to double check he'd actually gone, his work schedule, his visits to Mary. Mrs. Hudson's baby sitting availability and holidays. Mary's check up dates and visitation hours. A dozen video conferences for that month alone at the oddest hours (he recognized a few rather impressive names—a Swiss pediatrician, and two different brain trauma specialists from Korea and Egypt). Endless notes to trade shifts with people, sitter availabilities scheduled then scratched out then rescheduled then scratched out again and again. Notes on John's mental state, notes on Mary's progress (or lack there of), notes on Rosie's milestones. Across the desk were basic books on childcare and more advanced medical journals on the early signs and symptoms of what looked to be any and every plague known to half-pint kind. There were journals on brain damage from blood loss—long and short term effects, the chances of waking from various types of comas, possibilities of loss of some cognitive functions, the effects and stages of muscle atrophy, how to prevent and recover from atrophy, even a copy of Mary's charts which she really shouldn't have had access to—there were journals on PTSD and depression, but most crushing of all, there were journals on the long term effects of opioid abuse. In these, there were detailed notes and criticisms. In one in particular, there was a half written letter of courteous fury tucked between pages dictating in clipped tones exactly what Molly Hooper thought the author could do with his judgmental pity.
That your patients feel the need to self-medicate may stem from deeper problems than their implied lack of morals you have inexplicably ascribed to sobriety. I would highly recommend you begin the search for the root cause with your bedside manner, sir.
Sherlock couldn't help the fragile little chuckle that left him at that. Though hardly anyone respected her own title, Molly only ever denied using a fellow doctor's title when she was right and truly pissed. But it was still hard to see all this—the evidence of Molly's efforts to care for people on all fronts. He carefully removed the calendar from its little nail in the wall and began to turn back the clock. Through meticulous, color coded notes, Sherlock watched John's downward spiral; watched Rosie's various ear infections, a UTI, a brief bout of pneumonia, and some very angry penmanship beside a sitter's name explicitly reminding herself to never call the boy ever again; watched Molly Hooper put the whole of her life on hold for her friends. Worst of all was the discovery of an innocent little journal. It's tan cover was plush with yellow, pink, and blue whimsical designs sewn into the fake leather. It was a baby journal dedicated to Mary.
To Mary, with all our love.
I know it's not the same as having been here but I hope this helps.
-Papa Watson, Baby Rosie, and Godmum Molly
Sherlock would be quite willing to bet John didn't know a thing about this journal tracking his child's progress through life. The man was barely functional these days. Even if Molly had told him, there was hardly a guarantee John had heard her. As Sherlock flipped through the pages, he found Molly's meticulous nature put to good (although sometimes a bit graphic use—he was fairly certain Mary would be quite a bit less than heart broken to have missed the misadventures of Rosie Watson's constipation) use. But the further along he got, the more often he noticed the entries reading less like fastidious accounts of Rosie Watson's days and more like private letters to a friend and sometimes even as near to a diary as he could ever imagine Molly keeping.
It was suddenly all too much, the more he looked about her home, the more he noticed, the more he saw how neglected the woman he loved was. The house was colder because she kept the temperature at the bare minimum now that she was barely living here. Toby had not assaulted him with demands for pets and treats the moment he walked in because she'd had to give him up to a coworker or risk neglecting the poor creature utterly. Her fridge was no longer stocked with a small selection of fresh ingredients for the next few meals she planned to make but prepackaged, premade, store bought meals. Molly Hooper's work—the thing she had loved longest in the world, long before she knew of Sherlock Holmes—had been relegated to a corner, collecting dust as she struggled to keep not only her own head above water, but everyone else's as well. And despite her best efforts, she was drowning. She was drowning and no one had even noticed.
He could barely breathe, frantically shutting off all the lights, trying to hide what he'd seen, trying to somehow undo it all as he stumbled back to Molly's empty bed. He sought sanctuary there as he'd done on precious few occasions as a dead man. Only there was no sleep warmed Molly Hooper to curl around this time. So, coat and all, he tried to bury himself under the covers, tried desperately to find comfort in the smell of her surrounding him as he curled in on himself, burying his face in her pillows as he found himself crying for the third time in twenty four hours. But unlike the silent tears of realization and remembrance of Redbeard, or the resigned heart ache of Baker Street, these newest tears were nearer to hysterics as the great consulting detective crumbled in on himself.