Prompt: Love conquers all
From: I'm Nova
A/N: the next prompt response is funny, so I'm going to be a big meanie and whip up some angst for this response.
...
Mrs Hudson had known grief and loss when, at the age of 28, she lost her husband to a freak accident on the railway, and shortly after, she had suffered a miscarriage. She experienced the whole process; from hearing about their deaths to watching them both be buried in the same grave, being unable to obtain separate graves.
The process was the same for her at 49 as it had been at 28- Doctor Watson returned to London without the consulting detective, and morosely explained how his dearest friend had perished at Reichenbach Falls alongside Moriarty.
Mrs Hudson's world fell apart for the second time in her life. Only, this grieving process was slightly different from before.
She missed his peculiar quirks, such as him keeping his prized shag tobacco in the Persian slipper. She missed hearing his violin playing Mozart and Jean-Baptiste Anet and his own otherworldly compositions. She missed the smells of his malodourous experiments gone right and wrong.
Most of all, she missed how, in rare moments of quiet, rarely spoken, affection for those he cared about- Watson, Mycroft, Lestrade, Wiggins, Toby and herself- his steely grey eyes would soften from a determined, keen gleam to a silvery shimmer.
Sherlock Holmes had not only left behind a broken friend, but had left behind the mother who never was.
Still, she tried her best to be strong. Watson's brief presence in the flat brought on painful memories, but she made him tea and allowed him to grieve alone in their old rooms should he desire a moment of privacy. She dutifully dusted Holmes' belongings, leaving things as they were before he...he left.
Mrs Hudson herself kept her feelings buried, and, when visiting the cemetery, she would break down, and allow herself the relief she denied at Baker Street.
She left flowers for her unborn daughter and the child's father; and then, she would walk to a small memorial erected to Holmes to lay flowers, tidy it up a little, or merely speak what she could not say to his face.
As the consulting detective's body had never been retrieved from those treacherous Falls, they had instead arranged for a memorial to be built. A simple stone one, with the inscription:
'To the man whom had his quirks and peculiarities, and was never afraid to be who he was. A beacon for justice to the wronged, a light to those who suffered unbearable anguishes at the hands of evil. But, most important of all, a man whose friendship and loyalty, though seldom given, was strongly felt and reciprocated by those closest to him.'
It was a quote from Watson's eulogy- well, more a paragraph, but Lestrade, Hopkins, herself and Watson felt that this strongly summed up the man they had known, and had agreed to it being engraved on the memorial.