A/N: Sorry about the wait, you guys. Here's the next installment.
Samantha was awake before she opened her eyes. Sherlock knew but didn't urge her to stir, no matter how badly he wished to. He wanted her to be awake. To talk. To breathe.
He wanted her to be all right.
He knew she wasn't. He knew that she was probably in pain and exhausted. But selfishly Sherlock wanted her to open her eyes and give him the crooked smile she always had in reassurance.
Sam's eyelids fluttered for a moment before opening. The lights were dim; once Sherlock knew they were taking her off of an anesthetic, he'd only left on the dimmer lights that are typically on at night. He knew it would be easier on her after being asleep for so long. She squinted anyway.
"Hello, Samantha." Sherlock rubbed his thumb against the back of her knuckles, his hand already in hers.
She tipped her head to better face him, her eyes going to his face. After a moment, out came that crooked smile. "Hey, Will."
Sherlock smiled, relief flooding him momentarily. He squashed it down, knowing it was premature. "How are you feeling?"
The smile went away to be replaced by a thoughtful frown. "Sore, I think. And I have a headache."
Sherlock nodded his understanding, not comforted by the slurring of her speech. "Where are you sore?"
"Well…" She thought about it. "My neck. Mostly my joints."
Sherlock nodded again.
"And my back."
"Your back?"
"Yeah… right below my shoulder blades on either side of my spine." She elaborated after squirming as if to experiment. "But that's more of a sharp pain, actually."
Sherlock felt himself pale slightly. The doctor had told him what they'd found in that particular spot. Why she had been bleeding when Sherlock had pulled her out of the pool. It wasn't infected, and it wasn't dangerously deep, not having horribly damaged anything important. All of it was repairable.
And just deep enough to scar.
Her frown was locked in place. "I can't remember."
"What?" Sherlock broke out of his thoughts.
"It's not coming." She said. "I'm trying to remember what happened." Sam returned her eyes to him. "What happened?"
Sherlock didn't answer immediately. She didn't remember? He'd heard of this. Maybe she had experienced head trauma the doctors hadn't caught? Or perhaps this was a psychological block of some kind? That wouldn't particularly surprise him. The only real evidence of the events that transpired were the bruises and what was carved into her—
"Will?"
She sounded slightly panicked and that brought him back once more.
Sam had leaned forward, much more awake than before. Her eyes were intense even in the dim light, giving away her anxiety and concern without hindrance. She seemed to realize that there was something she was missing - something worse than what she'd been thinking of before.
Sherlock blinked, moving his mouth to try and force words to come out, but they wouldn't. None that he'd wanted to, anyway. Instead, he asked her gently "Do you remember what happened at the art museum?"
She furrowed her brow, confused. But only for a moment.
Her eyes flicked back and forth across the blanket on her lap as she seemed to rethink and gather what she could remember. He could see the moment she understood. Her eyes widened and her heart rate spiked on the monitor across from him.
Slowly her eyes lifted from the blanket to meet his. "How much of it was real?"
Sherlock clenched his jaw so hard it physically hurt before he could respond. "I don't know."
"Why not?"
"This is the first time you've been coherently conscious since the pool."
Samantha blinked. "The pool." She looked away. "Who was he?"
"Who?" Sherlock didn't know who she was referring to.
"The man who was with you," Samantha told him.
"Doctor John Watson."
"Your roommate?"
"Yes."
Samantha frowned and looked around the room. "Is he okay?"
"He's gone to lunch." Sherlock glanced at his watch. "We have about five minutes before he returns."
She nodded, slowly leaning back to rest against the bed once more. Her heart rate was still high, Sherlock noted without comment. She was also pale, but Sherlock wasn't sure if that was simply because she was in pain or something even simpler.
"Will?"
"Yes?" Sherlock's response was immediate.
But Samantha's wasn't, as if she were hesitating to finish her thought. "I'm really scared."
Sherlock felt a rock in his throat as he tried to think of how to respond. Eventually he just gently squeezed her hand. He knew she would take it as he meant it – a reassurance that she might not be all right, but she definitely wasn't alone.
John arrived a few minutes later, Samantha still mostly awake. Sherlock could tell she didn't want to sleep and was fighting it. A rather childish thing to do, but he wondered if there was something in sleep she was trying to avoid.
The doctor was barely through the door before he was talking to Sherlock. "I brought back a sandwich and I expect you to actually eat it instead of…" He trailed off, noticing Samantha's open eyes on him. "Oh."
"John, this is Samantha Holmes. Sam, this is John Watson." Sherlock passed the introduction.
John smiled and waved slightly. "Hello."
Sam returned the smile and tipped her head as she repeated the greeting.
John pushed forward in his speech, trying not to leave room from any sort of awkward silence. "I really did bring you a sandwich, Sherlock." He tossed the plastic sack in his hand at his friend.
"I'm not hungry."
"Fascinating, considering you haven't eaten in at least twenty-four hours."
"Don't patronize me, John. We had a case."
"No, you've eaten since the case. This is different. Eat your food."
Sam laughed lightly, watching the exchange and that pulled both of the men's attention.
She shrunk in on herself slightly at the focus they'd placed on her. "Sorry, it's just a familiar conversation." Sam looked at Sherlock and lifted her eyebrows. "Why haven't you eaten then, if you're not on a case?"
Sherlock hesitated. "I wasn't hungry."
"He was worried," John said as if he were translating a foreign language for Samantha.
The girl smirked. "That's awfully nice of you."
"I wasn't worried. Worrying does nothing but waste—"
"—time you could use to solve the problem." Sam finished for him, still smirking. "Yeah, I'm sure that's what it was."
John smiled and sat in one of the chairs seemingly quite content.
"Well, John, it's nice to finally put a face to the name," Samantha said kindly.
John looked thoughtful. "Sherlock's told you about me?"
"Of course he has, he's living with you. All of his stories have you in them."
Sherlock rolled his eyes.
"That's interesting because I hadn't heard of you until this whole situation happened," John mentioned, mildly confused.
Samantha hesitated, then looked to Sherlock. "You hadn't even mentioned me to him off-hand?"
Sherlock grimaced slightly. "No, it never came up."
"The fact that you have…" She stopped and reworded her sentence. "Mentioning to your flatmate that you're a legal guardian never came up? What about giving him a bit of warning so he knew what to expect?"
"He told me he plays the violin when he's thinking and sometimes he doesn't talk for days on end," John said, practically in a direct quote. "But nothing about having a daughter."
Samantha looked from John to Sherlock, who suddenly looked cornered. "I was definitely going to mention it."
"When? After I'd planned to come and visit?" Sam asked, more good-naturedly than John thought the phrase could ever be. "When did you actually tell him about me? When we were on the way to the hospital?"
She was joking, mostly, but that was the precise moment John realized Sherlock hadn't told her yet. Hadn't told her anything. He looked at his friend, who wasn't looking at anyone. Sherlock was staring at his knees, unmoving.
Samantha seemed to sense she'd approached a serious topic. "Will?"
After a silent moment, Sherlock lifted his chin to meet her eyes, removing his hand from hers. "I don't know how much you know about your kidnapping, but… a bomb went off at the museum. There were casualties, and we were told one of them was you."
Sam didn't react beyond a single blink of her eyes.
Sherlock continued. "Mycroft notified me shortly after your grandmother was informed. I told John then because I had to go to America to attend your funeral." The detective smirked, but it didn't hold. "John accompanied me."
There were tears in Samantha's eyes.
Sherlock hesitated. "I didn't want to see you like I've seen so many other people – dead because of humanity's violence. I was too afraid. So Martha was the one to identify the body as you, and it was cremated shortly after. By the time I arrived in Ohio, it was all finished."
He wasn't looking at her anymore, his eyes and head lowered in shame. "I didn't know you were alive until the pool."
The silence in the room was thick enough to suffocate. For a long time, no one said anything.
"I'm really sorry."
Sherlock looked up, confused. Why was Samantha the one apologizing? She hadn't done anything wrong.
But she looked so regretful, her face pinched into an expression that spoke of pain. "Had I listened to you last year—"
"Don't." Sherlock cut her off, and she looked slightly surprised. Whether that was because he had interrupted her or because of the pain in his own voice, Sherlock didn't know. "Please, Samantha," He pleaded. "Don't."
Her eyes welled up with tears. "But you'd said—"
"Even had you come to London and lived with me, or found a university in the UK to finish your degree, there's no guarantee this wouldn't have happened anyway."
John found himself satisfied at the exchange taking place, especially as Sherlock continued.
"This is not your fault." He told her. "And it's not mine either. It's Moriarty who is to blame."
They all knew that saying words and believing them were two different things. However, if only for a moment, Samantha decided she would pretend to believe them anyway and nodded her head.
Sherlock tried to smile. "I am truly sorry, though, for an additional reason."
"Why?" She asked.
"Because your favorite painting was caught in the explosion," Sherlock told her. "There was no recovering it."
Samantha tried to smile back. "That's okay; it was time for me to move on to a different one anyway." She looked down for a moment. "You actually flew to America for my funeral?"
"Of course."
"Why?"
"I promised," Sherlock told her, and John hadn't realized the detective could have been more serious than he was before. This was void of sadness, though, and there was an absence of any emotion other than his total focus and deliberate words. "Didn't I?"
Samantha seemed surprised. "You remember that?"
"Of course I did."
"Nothing against you, but I wasn't sure if you would keep it."
Sherlock frowned. "Why not?"
"Because funerals are events that are practically designed for you to hate." She answered as if she'd thought about it a lot. "I mean, nothing but sentimental talk about the person who passed, you sit there for hours sometimes doing nothing but listening to people talk and cry… It's basically everything you dislike."
Sherlock was still serious. "Of course I hated it, but that doesn't change that I promised. And I told you, back when we first met, that I wouldn't break a promise."
Samantha stared at him for a long moment before smiling sadly. "You enjoy proving me wrong, don't you?"
Sherlock smirked, the seriousness fading slightly. "I wouldn't say enjoy exactly."
When Sam responded with a soft laugh, Sherlock's smile was easier.
John eyed the two with an expression that was mixed. Amused and confused, mostly. It was very odd, seeing how Sherlock acted around Samantha. The intensity of his emotional response was something John hadn't ever seen in him. Perhaps it would fade as the emotions did regarding Samantha's staged death, but John felt something in him doubting the theory.
A/N: Yup, anyway, it's freezing where I am. We're expected to drop to forty below tomorrow. That doesn't matter if you use Fahrenheit or Celsius, it's the only time both of those thermometers land on the same number.
I'm gonna stay inside so I still have fingers to type these out, okay?
Also, WanderingSoprano, I love this new username just as much as the last. I'm so glad you returned to review the next chapter! I hope you enjoy all of the angst. There may be too much angst. I had a friend of mine ask me if there even was such a thing as "too much angst". I guess I'll find out.
Stay warm for my sake.
~Signature
