Author's Note: Hello everyone! I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to update. Writer's block, bad excuses, blah blah blah. Anyroad, it's really good to be back! Things you should heed for the chapter ahead: it's quite dark. QUITE dark. Yeah. You were warned. Blood TW and another one, which is highlighted in bold at the end of the chapter to avoid spoilers (meaning you just have to scroll down to the little bit of text in bold at the very bottom of this page to find it. Please do this if you have any other triggers). Also, if anyone wants to follow me on Tumblr: I'm .com If you do so, please let me know so I can follow you back!

Okay! Enjoy and please do comment if you have the time!

Chapter Text

Chapter 9: Ego Sum Perdidi (Part One)

No-one could've seen it coming. It's how it goes, it's how most things go, taking you by shock and throwing you against an inconstant wall of pain and misery. There isn't a bit of her that doesn't blame herself. There isn't a bit of him that blames her.

And that's just the thing about blame.

It tends to find a host.

Six weeks earlier…

"I mean it Sherlock, quit it." She yells, from the kitchen, finding yet again her usual Earl Grey replaced by decaf Lady Grey – less aggressive, he'd said.

"I haven't done a thing, Watson." He shouts back "What seems to be the problem?" he asks, walking into the expansive kitchen.

"My tea. Where is my tea?"

"How should I know? Ask Mrs. Hudson."

"Mrs. Hudson is not systematically hiding caffeine-based goods from me." She says "Did you bin it?"

"I would do no such thing!" He retorts, balancing his weight on his heels.

But of course he would.

He'd never given much attention to the properties of blood. It's a very dark crimson, it's bold, bright, oddly alluring. Its smell is remarkable, the iron prevalent in the distinctive odour. The stench is so strong it allows you to taste the substance, flavours dancing on your tongue as you struggle to keep it away from your body and mind.

He can't keep anything away from his mind.

Blood stains. He wonders what can be used to remove them. What is blood? Acidic? Alkaline? He doesn't know anymore. He fears he's given up on caring.

The black and white picture still sits on his nightstand.

He hasn't cleaned the bedding, the mattress.

He chooses to lock the door instead.

Five weeks earlier

"Watson, we're going to be late!" he yells, from the landing.

He would never admit to it, but he's excited. He wants to see it, the baby, even though he knows it'll look exactly like every single other ultrasound in the planet. It's not rational, he knows it, but he can't help it.

"I'm here." She says, appearing on the stairs. "Let's go."

"You look… lovely, Watson." He blurts out, analysing her newfound curves as they're hugged by her plum-coloured dress.

It shows. Perhaps not everyone can see it, but he's an observer by heart and a Watson admirer by formation. Her pronounced – gorgeous – cheekbones take on a rosy composition, her slender face growing a tad less slender each passing day. He notices her fingers first, as she wraps them around her familiar mug. Her hips come second, followed by her breasts and feet.

He loves her just that way.

"Thank you." She smiles "Ready?"

"When you are."

He cannot stop replaying the very moment in his head. His hands finding her stomach, as they always seemed to. His hands not finding it. His heart racing. His mind processing. His tears, his sweat, mixing with the humidity of her blood as he carries her body down the stairs. Her hair against his chest.

Her eyes on a brief moment of consciousness inside the ambulance, as his hand found hers in a fleeting moment of hope.

The paramedic's hands as his found her stomach, where lay not life, but the very opposite of it, in a haze he could only describe as a destructive trance.

He wishes he could forget, if for a brief second, the still silence of the sterile room where he sat when he saw her again.

Four weeks earlier…

"Sherlock, this is truly unnecessary." Joan says, as she runs her hands idly by some thousand dollar cot.

"What is?"

"Getting a cot right now. We have enough time, and I was thinking maybe Oren's wife could give us a hand? She does have two of these." She says, resting her hand on her stomach.

"Nonsense. I've done plenty of research." He tells her, throwing a leg over the rail of a walnut-coloured cot.

"Sherlock!" she reprehends, lowering her voice a few moments later "What on earth are you doing? Get out of there!" she tells him, watching as wiggles inside the cot.

"Sturdy." He says, getting out of the crib. "We'll take this one. Hello? I'm a paying costumer and I'd like some help here!" He shouts, to no-one in particular.

"No! We're not! Sherlock, let's go." She says, just as a tall blonde woman approaches them.

"Hello, and welcome to Giggle! My name's Kitty, what can I do for you this afternoon?"

He cleans the blood drippings from the foyer with white coloured tea-towel. He sees it everywhere. On the staircase rails, the hallways, the unsuspecting cloths. He doesn't know if it's her blood, their blood, or his blood.

His.

Should a child who never got to live be named? One who was put in a coffin but never in a cradle, who lived nowhere but the uterus of a woman it would never come to call mother, and who knew no home beside the hearts and bodies of its makers?

He couldn't tell.

Three weeks earlier…

"And this right here is the head." Dr. Lowry said, circling the blob with her mouse "those right here are the arms." She tells them, moving the cursor "and here you have the legs. I can't accurately predict the gender just yet, but I can give you an educated guess, if you'd like to know."

He looks at her, as if to say "your call". She nods in understanding and turns back to the doctor.

"I think we'd like to wait, thank you."

"Alright, then!" she smiled "Well, this it then. I haven't any further recommendations, none other than the ones I've already given you, Ms. Watson."

"Cut down on sugar, work less and eat more regularly, got it."

"Good. I'll see the two of you in four weeks four your sixteen week ultrasound then. Have a good day."

"You too." Sherlock responds, and Joan flashes her a smile.

Doctor Lowry makes her way out of the room and the two – three – of them are left alone, staring at the screen.

"Wow." She breathes.

"Wow." He agrees.

He opens the book she was reading that night, Reaper Man. He opens it on the page where she'd placed her marker, and reads the highlighted sentence.

"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."

He knows light travels at three hundred thousand kilometres per second. He hasn't a clue how fast darkness travels. But he knows the quotation is correct.

Darkness has a shortcut to all destinations.

Two weeks earlier…

"Llywelyn is a ridiculous name." she tells him, wiggling her socked feet on his lap.

"It is not! It is a perfectly traditional Welsh name."

"For spinster aunts."

"For perfectly proper lads."

"Absolutely not."

"I'd like to hear your suggestions, since you seem to find all of mine so terrible." He tells her, passing her The 2014 Complete Baby Names Almanac.

"Your suggestions were Llywelyn, Cymbeline and Teasag."

"All very appropriate monikers."

"Disagree." She tells him "Llywelyn and Teasag are impossible to pronounce, and I'm not naming our kid after the most obscure of Shakespeare plays. We also don't know if it's a girl, and all three of yours are girl names."

"Llywelyn is a boy's name."

"You're joking."

"I'm not."

She rolls her eyes at him and opens the book, scouring page 143 for a good idea.

"How about Porter?"

"Are you going to birth an eighty year old law firm associate?"

"Keegan?"

"Preposterous blonde football player. Inclined to date girls who find ignorance appealing."

"Eugene?"

"What has our baby done to you?"

He goes back to the hospital as soon as he manages to gather enough things to get them through two or three days.

He slips the key in his pocket as he walks down the steps of a home he's not sure it's his anymore, clutching the carryall firmly in his left hand.

He makes sure there's no more blood anywhere, but texts Mrs. Hudson so she can double check and fix any mistakes he might've made.

The ride to the hospital is long.

He doesn't know what he's going to do once he sees her.

S eventeen hours earlier

The world seems to turn slower around him as he leaps from his bed to the floor. His feet can't seem to accompany the fear in his heart, his hands tremble as they find her neck, looking for signs, signs she's not leaving him.

"Watson, Watson stay with me." He begs, kneeling beside her on the floor as he fumbles to dial 999 on his mobile. "Hello? I need an ambulance, my partner, she's pregnant, there's a lot of blood"

He gives the attendant the brownstone's address and takes his head to her heart, looking for both a heartbeat and comfort.

"Please don't leave me." He pleads, his tears mixing with the blood staining her sleepshirt.

It takes him a few seconds to gather the strength to carry her downstairs. He hears the faint siren of the ambulance just as he reaches the foyer, walking weakly towards the door.

It all gets really fast from there.

A paramedic takes her from his arms and asks him a few questions, before placing her on the back of the ambulance and offering him a place beside her.

He wishes there's an omniscient being who has enough mercy to take him too if she has to go.

Hospital hallways are cold. He always thought so, but that hospital, that day, seems particularly chilly.

He doesn't think about anything as he walks towards her room, he only hopes there's enough strength in him to carry them both on his back.

He opens the door.

The carryall falls to the floor.

His eyes and hands find hers.

His tears find her tears.

His soul finds her void.

His void finds her soul.

[TRIGGER WARNING]

GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF MISCARRIAGE. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.