Title: Mourning, Love
A/N: Warning, au (unexpected), female!Watson, married!Holmes, character death, references to suicide. Response to #3 Funeral.
How much death and loss could any one person bear in a single year, let alone one lifetime?
That was the question Joanne Hannah Watson seemed destined to discover the answer to when she returned to England in May of 1890 with the news of her husband's death, not even 12 months after the loss of her unborn daughter.
Then in July of that same year, her former flatmate and close friend, Mary Lestrade, was kidnapped and subsequentantly murdered by a crazed serial killer who'd turned out to be one of Mary's former clients.
Watson couldn't stop herself from thinking that if Holmes had still been alive, then perhaps she wouldn't have had another grave to visit.
And then the news came, a shepherd had found a body downstream from the falls.
Watson had had to return to Switzerland to identify the body.
Mycroft Holmes had accompanied her, wanting to make sure she didn't kill herself after seeing her husband lying on a cold, dead examination table.
Watson broke down into tears when it turned out that they'd found Professor Moriarty's body, not her husband's.
Once she had calmed down, Mycroft asked her why she'd become so hysterical.
"Look at his hand, Mycroft," Watson murmured. Mycroft did as he was bidden to do, and that's when he saw the gold chain, exactly identical to the one his brother wore around his neck with his wedding band safely out of the way of chemicals, grime, and ink.
Watson sobbed when the professor's hand was wrenched open to reveal Holmes' wedding band, with the inscription 'Forever Yours -JHW' on the inside.
Watson cried herself sick on the day that Holmes was declared dead. She didn't leave her bed--the bed she'd shared with Sherlock Holmes for the past seven years--for the following fortnight.
She'd probably have remained in bed for longer if her partner, Arthur C. Doyle, hadn't insisted that she get some fresh air.
Doyle was the one who kept Watson from killing herself in the years that followed those two weeks.
She was still wearing full mourning that fateful day in 1894, when an old, sickly bookseller came to Baker Street seeking her medical advice concerning his wife...