I didn't know what it was like to die until the day Mary shot me. I suppose it makes sense that my mind took me to my Memory Palace, my avatars flashing before my eyes one by one, trying to do their desperate best to keep me alive. I had depended on them to save others; now I needed them to save me.
I'd have stayed dead if it wasn't for the girl in the morgue. I stood over the vision of my own body, bullet-racked and lifeless, and I looked up to find Molly standing in front of me. I knew, in a fraction of a second, that the change was complete. My Science Girl was now, and forever, the Real Girl.
She was the one who stayed with me, the one who slapped me again, the one who saved me. When the other avatars were gone, when the light was receding into nothing but pale whiteness, she was with me. And even as I faced death, my mind racing, I loved her so much I thought that alone would kill me.
It makes so much sense—so much sense—that it was Molly who told me when to fall, for it was she, first as the Science Girl in my mind, and then as her real, flesh-and-blood self, who had been teaching me to fall for my entire life—to release the control I prized above everything else, to feel, to let go and become a whole self.
I have always been a man who wants to control his destiny. I take risks, but they are my own risks, the risks I calculate and the costs I count. I do not like to give in.
It was Molly who'd shown me what it meant to accept my feelings, by showing me that she saw them and still cared for me. It was she who had taught me to relinquish the illusion of perfection and admit my flaws because she would still care for me. She was the one who'd stood by me when I chose to fall off a building, giving in to an uncertain future. And finally, as my life seeped from my body, it was she who told me when to let go for the last time, the most important time of all.
I'd have been dead forever if she hadn't stayed with me.
I have never told you that part, about the way she stood by me in my mind when there was no one else, about how my last seconds were filled with flashes of her face. I was afraid it would upset you too much to know the truth about those seconds, but I can keep it from you no longer. Molly saved my life, as literally as if her physical self had been standing in front of me.
Little Sherlock, with his dog and his pirate ship, believed that science and logic were the most important things in the world, and so he created a Science Girl to represent all of those things. It was the Real Girl who finally showed him the truth, that no life can be complete without more than that.
She was the key that unlocked my heart, the heart an angry child had once buried inside an imaginary girl. All of my life's adventures and the winding corridors of my Mind Palace had finally led me to the reality that underpins all of existence. I'd been wrong, but I was happy to find out my error, there at the conclusion, when I thought I would never wake again. The mystery was finally solved, the cipher I'd been trying to solve for my entire life. Molly Hooper, the girl with brown hair and a while lab coat, solved it for me, her gift in my final seconds.
In the end, it was love that saved me, because, of course, love had been the answer all along.