It was quiet now that he boys were finally asleep and their strange piecemeal family had gone its separate ways, back into their fragmented existences, leaving only the three of them. The unfathomable trio left when everyone else had the leisure, and the anguish, of walking away.
Mycroft wanted to stand up, to go to their room as he had when they were little and spend the night in the chair watching them sleep. To hear their little breaths, to watch them turn, and limbs heavy and warm with sleep find one another in the darkness.
He wanted to know that they rested without nightmares. He wanted that indescribable feeling of sharing a room, nothing more than the air and slow radiating warmth.
He wanted to be with them as he finally killed them.
Today had been a good day. They had been perfect and wonderful and done everything no one should ever expect of them. He watched them stamp down the memories that still gripped their minds and tore at their hearts and bodies. He watched them push back the memories and fears that he had invoked by giving them too many people, too many realities to crash together and then throw on top of it the muted song of a violin that he knew now haunted their sleep.
Tonight might not be haunted with the images of an aborted childhood, but it would be filled with a sound, a song, which no longer existed.
He did not want to watch them thrash as the music pressed down on them and pulled at the memories just beneath the thin veil of the present.
The way Sherlock had looked when he would lock himself away at three in the morning and play until he forgot who he was.
The moment hours later when he would look up and realize that he had not hid himself at all, when he would realize that John had come down and spent the night with him and a cold cup of tea was turned with the handle facing him and John, who had listened for hours, had been lulled to sleep when Sherlock had unconsciously began to play the lullabies his mother had sung him years before.
So Mycroft was alone with the hum of his computer and the tapping of keys, the images of a brother who once was lingering in his mind's eye, imposing himself over the screen, blotting out the white blue light which softly filled the room.
The cursor blinked on the screen, each blip marking the time which past, each blink marking another moment in which he hesitated.
It was perfect. Everything about this moment was perfect. There was no other path but this, already chosen and laid down before him.
Their birthday, the anniversary of the day they had been reborn in a sea of blood and in the mad chaos of lost lives found themselves in his arms.
For two years Mycroft had lingered on this site, and kept alive that which had already been lost.
The blog of John Watson.
At first it was a means to an end. It was an alibi for when John Watson and Sherlock Holmes would be restored and able to reclaim their lives.
It was simple really, to log on and create an adventure which had taken them away. To leave notes to those left behind, to solve a case or two left in quandaries by D.I. Lestrade and write in Sherlock's bite softened by Johns words.
And then one adventure led to another and there was always that lingering hope that maybe, for once in his life, he was wrong. Maybe his brother would wake up one day and be the brother he remembered, the brother that he devoted so much of his life to protecting even when Sherlock never knew.
And then he fell in love with them. His boys. His children.
The contrasting cherubs who screamed and laughed and ran and needed him so very much.
But he could not help but miss him even as he held him in his arms.
When a case came up he would still reach for his phone and the beginning of a smile would touch his lips at thought of making Sherlock actually answer his phone and before it ever began to ring he would realize, he would turn it off and something cold and heavy would settle in his chest.
Sherlock would never scoff at another of his cases while secretly rejoicing. He would never glare in a way that was so obviously for show that it was almost like affection.
And he would text someone else to go solve the case, send a team off, and Sherlock would march through the room with his skull smiling garishly in his arms, John trailing behind in a pool of orange and he could not help but love. And it hurt.
But at night, at night Sherlock was not dead or lost or forgotten. He would never not be able to be mad and brilliant and every inch the man Mycroft had spent his adult life watching over.
At night he was all of the things Mycroft remembered of his one sibling. He was sharp and sometimes cruel and always brilliant and liked to pretend he did not, or maybe did not even know that he possessed, a heart. And every step of the way there was John Watson standing beside him.
Every adventure they took in these nighttime wanderings, every trick of fate and genius revelation was told through the eyes of the one person in the world who chose to love Sherlock Holmes.
It was…glorious. It was every idea which, barely formed in his mind had been buried deep into the place that drove him to watch his brother's life through CCTV instead of knocking on a door or reaching out to him.
To pretend in the darkness when twin breaths comforted his nerves and gave him new reason to live, that he was the man who had staggered through life and war and showed more honor in a cold car park than any man Mycroft had ever seen and still found it in himself to call Sherlock 'amazing'.
Two years. Two years he had made them travel the world; he had given them life even when he should have ended it. When hope died that they could ever return, that they could ever be these men again, he should have let this foolishness end.
Why spare the feelings of those who still believed in them? Everybody dies. Even those who are so much more than ordinary.
But they deserved a better ending than a simple goodbye. They deserved more than a note from a foreign country informing those who to whom it may concern that the bodies of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson had been discovered cold and abandoned.
They deserved an ending as spectacular as the lives they had led, as the lives they would lead.
And maybe he just wanted to hold on a little longer. Maybe he wanted everyone to see the Sherlock John had seen.
And he had given himself two years. He had built the plot of the end of their lives. He had created such an escalation of events that there could be no ending as perfectly formed as this.
Their birthday. Their death.
And it was time.
And he was not ready to let go.
It was perfect. A story of grand enemies and a secret conspiracy, Sherlock would have loved that. For two years they had drifted through the world bolstered upon the wind of this oncoming evil, always just a few steps away from the brink. A million pieces of a puzzle which on their own seemed like nothing more than the nuances of life but together became something beautiful.
They had been running at the end, not drifting from case to case on invitations and clues but running for their very lives. There could be no more leeway, the enemy had made a stand, unable to carry on with the continued interference of the detective and his companion. Now it was all just a dance to choose the final battlefield.
Posts grew less descript, not dropping clues about where they might be but that, for the moment, they were safe, using the posts to expound upon cases they had just left behind.
John telling the world in that almost painfully honest way of his the way Sherlock had outshone them all. Without reserve and without shame Johns writing was teaching Mycroft what it meant to be the best part of humanity.
The posts carried in them a tinge of dark adrenalin, the taste of small dark places and midnight bus terminals where they had become the things that go bump in the night. Wrapped in words was the feel of flesh pressed close through layers of foreign clothing, of dark curls finally dropping to another man's shoulder when sleep finally reached up and claimed him for its own.
There was, despite all of the careful deliberate optimism, the feeling of inevitable end. The end of the game when all of the players are weary and there is nothing left to do but break.
For a while they had found refuge somewhere untraceable, somewhere far away from London where the world it seemed could stop and they could breathe.
John spoke of emaciated limbs and hollowed cheeks regaining tentative new life. He spoke of new friends who could never have names but where none the less kind and sweet.
Sherlock posted in his blunt way that his cheeks were not 'sunken shadows of his former health' but rather the thinning effect of being on the run and that a certain brother may benefit from such a trail should he be reading, as he so inevitably was.
And just as the words lost their ability to recall wartime without consciously trying to invoke such imagery, when the words stopped meaning a life tentatively scraping an existence on the edge of a blade and deserts and gunfire where not imbedded into every update, the world seemed too perfect.
They were not huddling together in a darkened alley, bodies pressed so close that they were unsure where one person ended and the other began in the damp cold which bit the exposed skin of their downturned faces as voices in a thick and brutal tongue passed by. They were not running from one train to another in a mad dash of looking over their shoulder and never ever being able to trust more than each other.
As simply as a child, as if he had no idea what he was doing, John spoke of the future.
Of more than just the next day, the next minute.
He spoke about gardens.
He imagined packing a lunch and wandering with Sherlock and naming all of the medicinal plants he had never actual seen outside of text books and having Sherlock tell him the brutal uses of each in fantastical crimes.
He wrote about eating under the blue sky with imagined birds keeping watch for them not because they were escaping through the forest or because their bodies had finally given up on them and they had no choice but to lay down. He spoke of a tomorrow he could want to have.
Mycroft imagined warm smiles that were so small they were almost not there at all. He imagined a sun that did not burn their skin but returned to Johns a look of youthful fervor and added the slightest tinge of color to Sherlock's fine cheeks.
Sherlock solved five new cases by message alone, murders and abductions in the haughty tone that said that everyone should already know the answer, and then said as much in the comment portion of Johns posts.
D.I. Lestrade pretended not to know that Sherlock sounded almost…happy.
Donovan did not show as much restraint.
And then the gardens disappeared with the picnic lunches and the sunshine that never burns.
An unexpected murder in the village. A murder which no one in their microcosm of life would have committed.
Shuttered back into a single room, the smell of roughly hewn wood surrounding them, dark and heady. The stagnation of waiting behind a closed door not knowing what was welling behind it, what evil may await them should they abandon their foothold.
One last post, quick and hurried, the feeling of Sherlock pasing behind him, picking up items and then disregarding them as useless or unnecessary to carry when they would have to travel light. Picking up a book or something else small and cherished that had made the two year journey with them and then putting it back down. Hands on Johns shoulders.
Time to go.
'Bit of trouble- nothing to worry about.'
And then something telling. Something written as an after thought as he would be standing half out of his chair, Sherlock's hand warm and tense on his arm.
'We take care of each other.'
There had been posts by everyone after that. A mix of the worried, intrigued and confused.
The curser blinked at him.
Time to post.
Time to let go.
The clock on the computer silently marched onward.
11:30.
It was perfect in every way. Their perfect ending.
The way they would have wanted to go. The way they would have ended themselves had they not been taken away without a death. The way he would have lost them anyway.
It was everything he should have done every day for the past two years.
But it felt so wrong.
The writing style had changed. The words were awkward and painful where John had been elegant and warm. A password given away at the last moment. A request to a friend, one issued with brown eyes which no one could refuse.
Their escape had been abrupt. The information had flooded inward, someone had given them up. The boy who had died, no more a man than a child, had died instantly, a gun which should not even be found in this country. A room abandoned so quickly that the remnants of life still littered it as if Sherlock might at any moment come back and clam the shirt he left so haphazardly on the floor, the laptop still open from when Johns fingers had last skimmed it.
They left on foot and only a few knew which direction they had taken. They could make a single rendezvous in an hours' time high in the mountains to be given supplies they could live off as they disappeared once more into the wilds of the world and after that they would be lost.
They had not anticipated that the boy who had been sent to meet them would be crying as if his mind had been torn apart and left nothing but ragged sobs.
Sherlock grabbed the small satchel and turned to leave having everything he wanted in his possession, but the one thing he needed lingered.
John kneeling at the boys side, coaxing the story of the sister, of the little girl who had time and again run to John with a flower or some small gift of affection. A firefight, a quick dirty affair which left several injured, most dying, as the shooter, a mercenary more likely than their main quandary, disappeared into the forest.
John had not even seen it as a choice.
He would go back, it would be safe enough if the boy led the way through the back alleys and hid in the long shadows of the ending day. He would meet Sherlock with more supplies, with fresh information. He could gather the medical supplies they would need to survive further into the wildness.
Sherlock saw the choice, knew every outcome as if it were inevitable truths laid out before him, but he did not hesitate. He did not consider for a single moment the choice not taken.
If Sherlock held him too tight as they said their silent goodbye, if his eyes lingered just a moment too long as if memorizing what was already emblazed in his memory John contributed it to the much more obvious, the idea that it might be John who was walking to his death.
They parted without a word and John did not mind. He knew the way Sherlock worked and he would not die and leave him. He would see him again and they would travel to the end of the world together.
John would not know his mistake until a friend met them on the path, the man who had known Sherlock long ago and taken them in as his own kin when they had shown up at his door ragged and half alive.
There had been no fight, no one had died because of them, no lives had been put into danger because of their existence in this place.
Another traitor had been outed in the village since they left, since the boy had been intercepted and told to run ahead with a package and told of the massacre.
John would never see the final battle.
He would not see Sherlock make the lonely journey up the face of the waterfall to where a dark figure stood waiting for him as if guarding the gates of hell and all of eternity lay before him. A dark lined face that spoke of London air as thick as water, a body that seemed so out of place against the soft green beauty of the world in which they stood that it seemed as if he had come to be here by magic rather than the way Sherlock had come with his dirty shirt and torn trousers, dirt smudging his pale cheek.
He would never hear the words the two enemies exchanged. He would never really understand what it had meant that he was not there to witness the exchange nor to take part in the inevitable outcome that lay before them. He would never know that this moment, this chosen ending, was for him.
One sacrifice in a life of unrelenting self-service.
One life gambled to set another free.
What John would know was that the only sound in his world was the efficient intake of his own breath and the pounding of his blood through his heart like the sound of a war drum, like the sound of young men falling to the ground in a spray of bullets and delusions of grandeur.
He knew that time was running too fast.
Knew that he was the last player in a game in which no one could come out alive and everyone but him could see the finale before they had ever begun to play.
He would feel the panic as he approached the falls and he sound of crashing water filled the world, the last few steps looming as a barricade between what could be and was, time frozen beyond the final veil even as his lungs seared in pain and his heart pounded and his hands and feet grappled for desperate purchase on the final incline.
The rocks would loom before him treacherous and damp and smelling of the dark things rotting in the forest and the unending spray of water and he would not take a moment to pause for fear or wait for backup which had followed in his wake.
It was too silent.
Without the dark rumbling mutter of a voice snarling that the end had come.
Without the achingly familiar sound of self-assured brilliance.
From here the wording would change. The sentences abrupt and the words haggard.
As if each sentence, each moment of recollection was a physical pain. A staggered step, a torn breath.
If this were a hundred years ago, if this was a final note goodbye instead of an electronic update, if messages still held the physical manifestation of the sender, the handwriting would be in dark blotchy ink, black orbs dropped to the paper and then smudged by a careless or unseeing hand, the writing would be harsh and slanted, as if each pen stroke was not a simple line but a barb cut into flesh. If this were a letter sent back in a horse drawn carriage in a more elegant time, tear stained watermarks would smudge the words here, warning before the words were ever read the truth of their ending.
John is almost falling as he reaches the top, as the waterfall opens before him in all of its sick grandeur.
And no one is there.
Footprints sunk into the earth, a battle at the uppermost ledge, hundreds of meters in the air where the water is like a fine mist you breathe into yourself.
He can see it though there is no one there.
Hands twisting into black fabric, fingers clutching and pulling. Two dark figures against a world of green.
The scrape of a shoe on the edge of the ledge.
A moment of weightlessness. Of neither falling nor standing.
Sherlock.
And though he will never hear the gasp as white hands reach out not to pull himself back but to tangle and entwine he can see them.
Sherlock's sharp blue eyes.
The smile on his lips as he falls back like an angel about to take flight.
The smile that meant yes, of course he had known this was coming.
The smile that meant that their quandary of the past two years had finally made a mistake.
He had underestimated Sherlock's heart.
It doesn't stop John from screaming.
From the name tearing itself from his body.
He falls to his knees on the wet earth, leaning dangerously over the ledge into nothingness, screaming at the top of his lungs although the wet heat of loss has already begun to seep into his voice.
And there is the roar of water.
And the echo of his own voice like a ghost reaching back for him.
'SHERLOCK!'
He screams again and waits as if there is a chance that the first time he had not heard, he leans further into the abyss as if waiting for a response.
A hand tangles into his coat and pulls him back from the edge and John tumbles into the wet dirt, looking up with pleading eyes at the man who had taken them in and treated them like family.
He lets himself be dragged away from the cliffs edge, away from the endless abyss with its roaring white water.
Footsteps in the dark soil leading up to the battle, evenly spaced, calm and unhurried.
John follows the echo of Sherlock back through time.
Footsteps lead to an alcove, a small outcropping of stones and the tangle of vines hearty enough to survive in the extreme habitats of the Earth. And it is beautiful. The falls stretch out before him impossibly huge, green and black and white and so far from the streets of London, so far from the rooms in which they had shared a life.
A coat carefully folded and placed, just for him.
He takes the coat into his arms without knowing why. Just to hold it. To feel the familiar cloth in his hands and want it to still be warm.
It is cold and damp and John can feel it, this slow moving horror rising within him.
But he does not cry.
He is still waiting for a voice to echo back to him. He just has to wait. Just has to believe in Sherlock.
And then he feels it wrapped in layers of wool in his arms. Dry and safe, a paper folded into the coat.
He sits down on the rocks where Sherlock had been only minutes ago knowing that John would come for him, knowing that John would follow.
He opened it with a flash of hope. A single perfect moment as the water crashed and rose in a mist over the land and maybe, beneath its roar Sherlock cried out for him to come.
A page written in familiar dark script, like living brilliance.
And in the too honest mirror of his dark brown eyes hope rose, and flickered, and in a breath which hitched and caught in his chest, in the missed beat of a heart, it died.
There was a moment silence, like a moment of weightlessness, like standing on the edge of a precipice with an indulgent smile, knowing you were about to fall.
And the dry beautiful paper, the words written so carefully, so beautifully, smudged beneath the fall of burning, wet, tears.
The silence did not end peacefully, it was broken in a jagged cry of pure unendurable anguish. Angels might fall so beautifully but humans were doomed to earth bound torments.
John buried his face against the cold coat and cried out a name in a sob which had no reply, the sound smothered and died against soft wool.
Tears falling into dark wet cloth as if they never existed.
The paper. The note goodbye, crumpled and crushed against a throbbing chest.
And time passed and water fell and light disappeared until all that remained was the glistening twilight lighting the mist.
When a hand fell on Johns shoulder and a soft voice told him it was time to go home there were no tears on his face and if any remained imbedded in the coat in was too dark to betray their existence.
His movements were careful and slow as if the passage of the last hour had taken the toll of a lifetime on his body and each motion had become the work of the utmost difficultly and pain.
He did not say a word as he stripped off his own coat and lay it on the ground, folded in the unconscious moves of a wartime soldier, slipping his arms into black wool which engulfed him like a blanket. He never put down the note, never unclenched his fingers from around whatever truths it held.
In a voice without emotion John explained the events which had happened to the friend who stood still with tears in his eyes. He explained that he would not go back, that it would not be safe for the village.
He gave him the password and asked him to write to the others, to tell them what happened. They deserved that much at least. He pulled the coat tighter, fingers curling over the edges of the long sleeves.
He did not ask what the note contained and John did not offer.
He put a hand on Johns shoulder, on wool that still looked like Sherlock, and promised. But he would not let John go alone, not tonight, not like this.
John agreed easily, too broken to argue, a nod his only consent.
But brown eyes flickered back to where footprints still betrayed the final dance, to where names echo and return and water fills the air.
Just a moment.
One last look.
One last goodbye.
John started the climb back up, following the ghost of Sherlock's footprints, careful never to trod on them but always next to them as if they had walked this path side by side if only hours apart. Over green moss and grey rocks and nothing that looked like home except warm black wool.
He disappeared in and out of the mist, the dying light playing across the water, lighting rainbows in the air.
John Watson stood on the highest precipice, staring into the churning water hundreds of meters below, leaning over as if he could defy gravity, as if nothing could touch him now.
The man looked away. It seemed too private. Like watching the vivisection of a soul.
And then without a noise, without a breath or a cry, John Watson fell.
As if gravity had decided to wrap itself around him and reclaim him.
Nothing but a black figure falling against white water and maybe, maybe a smile that meant yes, of course I knew this was coming.
And the words would sputter and stop.
Electronic messages devoid of tear stains and smudged ink.
The perfect ending to an imperfect life.
Time to let go.
To bury the brother he had failed, two years too late.
To abandon the man who had shown him through writing what it meant to be a good man instead of just a great one.
To kill them once and for all.
The clock struck five in the morning in the silent way it does only to tell you that somehow the last five hours of your life had disappeared without you seeming to notice.
The curser still blinked at him but it feels different this time.
The story has changed.
It is less perfect.
Not the ending they deserve, but the ending they all need.
He clicks enter before he can change his mind. He can go back and erase it of course, but he won't.
Soon the sun will come up and two little boys will wake up and the world will start all over again. Another year, 365 days to make everything go right this time around or at very least, to make it better.
Scotland Yard will wake up and check Sherlock's stagnant website and Johns blog the way they do every day even if they deny it to one another. Each one will sit in his or her home with a cup of tea or coffee with the numbness of sleep still making their limbs heavy and their minds slow, and they will read the last blog of John Watson.
The Final Problem.
It was close, the story begins as a warning, the whole episode at Reichenbach.
The writing is different this time, slightly perfunctory and very nearly preoccupied in lieu of John's elaborate romantic writing, but it is in perfect English.
It is the story of a final battle between opposing sides when the option to run is no longer of any value.
The talk between parties is ignored, it is of no value, and in any case the finer points would be lost on a reader of even moderate intellect.
It is only necessary to understand that this is no longer a battle in the theoretical or of conspiracies and networks, this was a battle which had devolved into its most basic and inevitable form.
Two bodies locked in a conflict, hand to hand combat miles from civilization where no one else could be caught as collateral damage. A spot chosen as much for its desolation as for the dramatics of meeting at cliff face edge of a waterfall.
The two opponents were evenly matched in intellect and brute strength and their companions had been diverted and left behind. The end would come either at the first mistake or when one or the other decided to end it at the cost of both of their lives.
It was the other man who made the final gesture forsaking any other ending.
He clawed his hands into Sherlock's coat and with a twisted smirk let himself fall.
It was impossible to hold them both up, to keep them on the slippery unforgiving ground at the edge of the precipice. His shoe scrapped into the rocks and wet dirt at the edge in a last hopeless bid to remain standing but the ground gave way and the other man was already falling, weightless and laughing.
And so Sherlock Holmes fell.
A split second of peering into to abyss, of having nothing beneath him but air and water and the sound of crashing water coming up to meet him even as his enemy fell away to find a solitary death.
But firm hands curled into his clothing, wrenching him back. He slipped anyway, already falling, already building momentum, but John was there holding onto his hands as he fell and caught. John holding him as he hung above nothing.
And John was strong, every inch the military man, the loyal companion, and he was almost smiling, adrenalin and relief flooding him as they were reunited.
But the ground was wet and the rocks beneath them were falling away.
If Sherlock held on they would both fall in a torrent of dirt and stone.
John would never let go, would never let him slip through his fingers.
But Sherlock could save them. There was a ledge unseen from up top, little more than a few stones gripping the side of the cliff face, stones he could grasp onto, stones which would inevitably incur injury by were unlikely to bring death.
And so he smiled.
There was no time for words nor the breath to waste on it, but John would understand.
And so he fell.
Above them a fool of a man, the witless partner to the fallen enemy, had witnessed what he no doubt interpreted as the death of his master and that of Sherlock Holmes and no one remained to blame except the one man left standing on the edge of the world. Rage painted his vision red, emotion clouding an already inferior mind.
The gunshot echoed through the cavernous waterfall as if the bullet was tearing apart the very air.
John Watson fell to his knees as the bullet tore through his upper chest, piercing just above his heart.
A lesser man would have fallen, would have screamed and lost his mind in agony.
John fell into the dirt as it darkened with his blood, his chest and face splashed with crimson.
But John had never been ordinary.
If he died there would be no one to stop the shooter from doing the same to Sherlock when he reached the top.
The shooter had exposed himself from his hiding place, foolishly believing that he was safe. He never even saw the glint of the gun.
Johns hands did not shake at all.
It only took Sherlock the matter of moments to scale the cliff and tear off his soiled leather gloves. Sherlock pressed his white hands against the wound, steaming the blood flow, refusing to let John slip through his fingers.
And that was it.
Covered in blood and bruised and feeling the steady beat of a heart which had nearly stopped beneath his hands, he was done.
They were done.
Sherlock had nearly lost John and that was unacceptable.
The words of the blogger seemed to run away with him for a moment, caught up in the action now written on the page, on the emotions and repercussions lingering in those thoughts.
As if they were too painful to linger on, the darkest moments of the story were flitted past quickly and efficiently.
If the two shared any words at the end of their trial, soaked in blood and gasping for breath they would remain ensconced in mystery, locked in the minds of those who survived them.
The author turned towards the present and the future.
John was alright. He would be alright. He was to get out of surgery within the hour and the prognosis was good, considering how mortal the wound had the potential to be.
He would retain intact mental function despite the extensive blood loss and regain most of the range of motion in his shoulder and arm.
John Watson is too strong to die.
The writing felt as if it were leaving most of the words unspoken, that minutes or perhaps hours had been spent on the last line, deleting and adding adjectives to describe John Watson and finally 'strong' was the meager compromise which had been while perhaps too unintentionally revealing, honest.
John would survive, but he would need to rehabilitated.
They were going away.
Somewhere John could recover from his wounds without the slightest possibility of death. Things had escalated rather badly in the last two years and a return to London would inevitably mean a return to established enemies and dangerous work patters.
They were going somewhere where no one had ever heard of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, somewhere where John could recover and maybe once he was suitably fit they would continue as they had.
However, until further notice Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were effectively retired.
This blog would no longer be updated. This post existing for the soul purpose of assuring everyone who still took note of their lives that they were still alive somewhere out in the world.
John would be out of surgery soon and he had every intention of being there no matter what the doctors said about him being unconscious.
John would know he was there.
Any efforts made to find them would prove entirely fruitless. Sherlock had taken steps to make sure that they would never be found and anyone who journeyed to Reichenbach Falls would find nothing but a serene looking waterfall.
So do not bother trying. Lestrade. Mycroft.
Of course he had yet to inform John of their plans for immediate retirement and subsequent settling down but John would more than likely be amiable to such an idea, or it would at least grow on him.
He remembered John saying something about watching the sun rise over the ocean and keeping bees.
So until the end of their retirement or for the duration of their lives this was their digital farewell.
There would be no need to worry about them.
They would take care of each other.
The curser blinked at the very end of the post, marking time which seemed very suddenly, to have not yet started at all.
SH
A handful of hours later, when London was waking and Scotland Yard was just sitting down with their cups of coffee and tea, bleary eyed and swathed in bathrobes to read the blog of a man who had once existed, two little boys invaded the silence of Mycroft's contemplative melancholy. Running into the room arm in arm, eyes twinkling with the excitement of yet undiscovered things, and dressed as lunatics, Mycroft gathered them into his arms and held them as if he would never let them go.