Thank you for all the lovely reviews! I've really appreciated them. Now, on with the final part!
"So where exactly is this Moran?" John asked, hurrying to keep up with Sherlock's rapid pace. That was one thing that hadn't changed over the last eighteen months.
"Montague Street, he's been there the whole time," Sherlock told him, fingers flying across the small screen of his phone .
John stumbled a moment in sheer incredulity. "The one opposite Baker Street?"
"Yes, John, do-" he cut himself off, looking nervously back at John. Maybe things had changed after all. He turned his gaze back to his phone, but continue to sneak small glances at John, almost as if he was unsure what John might do. "Yes, the Montague Street opposite Baker Street," he repeated, scathing tone replaced with something more contrite.
"What about Mrs Hudson, is she safe?" John asked, overlooking Sherlock's uncharacteristic pause.
"Yes, she's fine," Sherlock replied absently, phone now put away in favour of scanning the rooftops. "She's looking after something for me, I dropped it off earlier."
John stopped in the street, holding onto Sherlock's arm to pull him to a halt as well. "Are you telling me this whole time, Mrs Hudson knew?"
Sherlock frowned. "What? No, of course not. No one knew, no one but Molly."
John paused for a moment to digest that information, then continued on. "So you just showed up at her door saying "Hi Mrs Hudson, I'm back from the dead, do you have any tea'? You could have given her a heart attack!"
"Well obviously I didn't, and why would I have asked for tea?" Sherlock tugged his arm out of John's grip and started off again. "Never mind, irrelevant. John, we need to go!"
John ran off after him, rolling his eyes at the obliviousness of his best friend even as he secretly rejoiced at having him there to be oblivious at all. Their walk turned to a run, until they were going fast enough that neither could spare the breath to talk.
Sherlock came to a halt, John only just noticing in time to stop himself from crashing nose first into Sherlock's coat. Sherlock tossed him a withering glance, but made no comment on it. "Moran's been renting this flat, under a false name of course, since I died, probably using it to keep an eye on you, see if I really was dead." John winced at Sherlock's cavalier tone, but Sherlock paid him no mind. "Naturally, once we started taking down Moriarty's web he would have known I was alive, but he knew I would return here to finish the job."
"That was the plan, then?" John interjected, voice full of carefully concealed optimism. "That you would come back here?"
Sherlock looked at him in bemusement. "Of course, where else would I go?"
"Well, you could have stayed with Mycroft." The look of absolute horror on Sherlock's face was enough to break John's deadpan expression and send him into a hastily muffled fit of laughter.
The sound of a pebble scattering across the ground sent his mirth fleeing. John looked to Sherlock, and Sherlock confirmed; Moran was here. John sunk back further into the shadows of the wall, calling on all the skills he had acquired over the last year and a half to aid him. Beside him, Sherlock did the same, his dark coat and curls rendering him near invisible.
A shadow stretched across the wall, drawing shorter and shorter as Moran drew closer. For one heartstopping moment, Moran paused at the base of the staircase, eyes searching, nose lifted like a bloodhound. John held his breath, willing his muscles to remain still - and then he was gone, up the stairs and out of sight.
"Breathe, John," Sherlock whispered. John let out his breath in one great whoosh, the sound oddly loud in the absence of the tension that had preceded it. "Listen to me: Moran is just at the top of those stairs, preparing to shoot me."
John felt a shiver of panic race up his spine. "I thought he didn't know we were here!" he hissed, barely remembering to keep his voice low.
"Pay attention, John!" Sherlock whispered back. "It won't take him long to realise I'm not actually there, so we'll need to move quickly. Remember, he's a very dangerous man."
John gripped the reassuringly solid butt of his gun. "Yeah, well, so am I."
Sherlock grinned at him, the familiar manic smile that came from a case nearly over. Almost without though, John's face formed a matching smile, dark and dangerous where Sherlock's was brilliant and blinding, but each equally set on this one goal. After tonight, Moran would never again be a free man.
They crept up the stairs, listening to the soft sounds of movement from above. When they reached the top, they split, one to each side of the door. Sherlock looked to John; John nodded. They slammed through the door, John with his gun out and ready to fire, only to stop short at the utter emptiness of it, nothing there but a half assembled rifle on the floor. There wasn't a chance to ask what had happened before the gun was knocked out of John's hand.
"The great Sherlock Holmes," Moran laughed scornfully, pointing his own gun at the two. "Fooled by someone hiding behind the door. I expected better of you, Holmes, and you too, Watson. Hardly worth the hunt-"
Moran shifted the gun, and John took his chance, punching him right in the nose and sending the other man reeling backwards.
Moran wiped the blood from his nose, sneering at John, and returned with a right hook, hitting him square in the eye. A flurry of blows followed from both sides, John hardly noticing when he was joined by many more. What seemed like half Scotland Yard had shown up, and were happily laying into Moran, who was now barely standing upright, though the bruises developing on many of the crowd showed that he had made his mark.
The sound of sirens brought John out of his battle haze, and part of him wondered how he hadn't heard them before. Surely there must have been sirens when the Yard showed up?
"I had Lestrade and a group of his officers wait around the corner for my signal," Sherlock said, curls only slightly mussed from the fight. John wiped blood from his lip, all too aware of the dirt on his clothes and bruises on his face. Sherlock saw the motion and huffed. "The ambulance is here, so get someone to look at that. If you're lucky, you can charge Moran with assault."
Laughing at the idea, John left Sherlock examining the air gun and complied, being joined by Greg only a few moments later.
"Come full circle, hasn't it, mate?" Greg grinned, crouching down beside John as the medic iced John's rapidly darkening eye.
John shrugged off the shock blanket the medic had insisted on, ignoring the reproving look, then turned to Greg. "Full circle? How?"
"With the cabbie. His Majesty over there," Greg jerked a thumb at the pacing Sherlock, "in the back of an ambulance with a shock blanket, and now you here with another one. In fact," he lifted up the blanket John had discarded, taking a closer look, "might even be the same one. All we're missing is a mysterious shooter." He gave John a significant look.
"Probably could have come in handy," John agreed cheerfully. Greg rolled his eyes in mock exaggeration, but left it alone, moving off towards one of the other officers who had been injured in the fight.
John left the shock blanket behind as he walked over to Sherlock, the medic who had attended him now having moved on to someone else. "There was a Ron Adair we tracked down once, had some connection to Moriarty though we could never figure out what it was," John said. He gestured to their surrounds. "He died just like this, empty room, no signs of entry, and no sound of a gunshot."
"Moran's work. He loves kills like this, where no one can trace it back to him. Who would expect an antique air gun to be the murder weapon?" Sherlock sniffed haughtily. "Mycroft must have been positively ill not to figure that one out."
John glared at him. "It was the one year anniversary of your death, you pillock. He was grieving!"
Sherlock scowled, looking slightly abashed. "I wasn't to know that, was I?"
John looked at Sherlock, willing his expression to convey his utter disbelief at both the Holmes brothers and their utter ineptitude at understanding emotions, and how John himself was unsure how he had survived dealing with them for so long.
Sherlock looked down. Message received, then. John decided to take pity on him, bumping Sherlock's shoulder companionably. "Let's go home."
It wasn't until the next day that he realised Sherlock's smile was because, even after all these months, he still called Baker Street home.