"There are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than
too late."

"Oh Yes" – Charles Bukowski

The room was utterly silent, a vacuity, void of noise, movement, sound, save for one man's shaking breaths and the background sounds of the street.

The silence wasn't screaming at Sherlock like it had before, when it was all white noise and static screeching and pounding in his head, pulsing and prodding like a black current underneath the frozen no no no not him not him not him anyone else anyone else take me do anything you'd like to me but not him please. It was softer now, a high-pitched wind that whistled through holes scraped into shredded metal.

He didn't remember how he'd gotten back to the hotel. He didn't remember anything other than the feeling of heat on his face and the sudden realisation that he had nothing to live for any longer. Maybe he didn't want to remember.

The aftermaths of the cocktail of Moran's drug and whatever Mycroft had given him to sedate him made him feel disconnected, adrift amid nothing and everything, but unfeeling, unattached. In some way, he felt grateful. It had temporarily achieved the heroin promise; the reassurance of the shadowy bliss, that blessed state of not caring about anything. It had made him not feel John's absence at all. He could convince himself he'd gone out to buy milk, that he'd be back soon, surely—

Yet some rational part of him knew otherwise.

This was worse, so much worse than Ante-John, before 221B was theirs and it was just his, just Sherlock's, when he often wondered if he would always be a solitary creature, it was worse than that lonely cigarette after The Woman faked her death, and far worse than Sine-John because he had hoped that one day to return.

John would not be coming back. Death was, if anything else, confident in its abilities to ensure its own permanency. As surely as the sun would rise every day, so would John Watson lie still, never to rise again. The thought made him feel like he was drifting over something dark and empty.

This was Post-John, singularly more worse and terrible than anything else he had been through, something he had never hoped he'd live to experience, something he'd sacrificed three years of his presence for, and it ended in the one event that he knew would break him entirely.

This was an existence that he couldn't abide by. Not after he'd tasted the divinity of being with him, kissing him, holding him, opening himself for him. Not after he'd chosen to hand over his heart and all his darkness plugged into it like wires only to have his army doctor disappear with it into places that Sherlock couldn't travel to and get it back from, leaving his chest hollow as the warm pulse faded from him and his blood turned to stagnant standing-water (a physical improbability but nonetheless accurate).

He couldn't bring himself to eat or think or sleep. He couldn't even think of...of him anymore. Not by name. He couldn't. He just drifted through space, ignorant of the stars and light and beauty, just seeing blackness, slowly moving along into the infinite parameters.

He shut his eyes.

After the car park had been swallowed by flame, he heard them. The sirens. Apparently it was international custom for emergency help to arrive too late when you really needed it. As the trucks wailed and people rushed around him to put out the twin fires, he sat where he had collapsed in the damp dirt.

He couldn't move. He just stared at the fire.

Stared with an abstract fascination that such a simple thing, something no one ever thought of when it was small, could grow and gain the power to take away everything and leave nothing behind. The was life, wasn't it? Pillars of fire. You never thought about it when you could contain it, when it was a shadow inside you, and then one day you turn around and it's a mountain behind you that swallows you before you can realise just how big it's gotten.

The drumming was back in his head like it never left. That drumming that drove him to heroin so he could tune it out. That drumming that ceased as he turned his head and in that silent echo glanced at the small soldier in that hideous jumper, staring at him from between cop cars with a bent cabbie's blood on his hands.

The drumming that pounded louder than it ever had as smoke poured into the sky. That offbeat rhythm of hundreds of drums, all out of tune with one another, creating that cacophony that made it impossible to think. Sirens. Shouting. Fire gulping down the air. Smoke billowing into the night. Feet pounding in the mud. Metal keening as it collapsed. The sound of air brushing against the sheets. Car alarms screaming as their bodies burned alive. The small huff of laughter John had made after he'd licked a spot on Sherlock's neck and he'd flinched. The heartbeat under Sherlock's palm, steady and constant. The shouting, the running, as the garage collapsed into itself. The sound of John murmuring his name.

Alone. All alone. He'd had Heaven underneath his hands, and now it was gone. Turned to smoke. No more John.

John. He's dead. He's dead. He's dead. You failed him. You let him die. And you don't even have a body to bury. How karmic.

It was that thought more than the others that made him realise how wet his face had become. How badly his chest hurt. How achingly hollow the small sounds coming from his throat were.

At some point that night, Mycroft had stood beside him. He hadn't said a word. He knew Sherlock wouldn't hear him. After the last of the fire had been smothered, after the ash stopped smouldering, he made the mistake of attempting to get Sherlock to leave.

"Sherlock," He said softly, laying a hand on his brother's shoulder. "We have to go now."

Sherlock's head twitched as if he was shooing away a fly.

"Sherlock."

His gaze stayed on the smoking debris in front of him.

He'd been naïve, assuming that anything that might belong to John had survived. Nothing could have survived that inferno, that fireball that guzzled the atmosphere into ruination in its maw until it'd had its fill and imploded like a dying star.

Naïve, to think that he might fall to his knees in the rubble and find John if he dug deep enough.

His hands were bloody by the time Mycroft managed to drag him out. Whatever Moran had injected into him made his thoughts blurry, unfocused, drowned in the sound of the drumming. Made him think the stars looked nice instead of the fact that John Watson was nothing more than dust. It'd be nice to think that his atoms were now free to float up into space, nice to think that the stars he was staring up at as Mycroft and another person carried him to a waiting car now contained the last particles of John Hamish Watson.

Nice, but illogical.

The stars were bright tonight.

Mycroft said nothing about the tear tracks cutting through the smoke and grime on Sherlock's face, just as he didn't mention the blood on his hands or the blankness of his stare. If life with Sherlock had taught him anything, it was that the most human elements of his brother were best kept unmentioned.

Mycroft dreaded the moment with every fibre of his being when Sherlock's gaze cleared and he asked where John was. It was going to be cataclysmic, a meltdown of unparalleled fury.

Sarajevo would crush under the weight Sherlock's grief.

Mycroft, contrary to the popular opinion that he was emotionally dead, was not entirely unfeeling. Though the sadness that weighed on him was mostly borne of sympathy towards Sherlock's loss, he himself had enjoyed the army doctor's existence, his positive influence in Sherlock's life, not to mention the fact that he had never seen Sherlock so peaceful when John was around since they were children. John had been a good man, and he was sorry to see the world void of his presence. John had been the sole inherently good thing in Sherlock's life, and Mycroft had appreciated him on his own merits, his nobleness, his kindness, his loyalty, and not necessarily by necessity.

He looked down at his brother.

He had seen Sherlock blacked out and faded from drug use, seen him feral and deadly from withdrawal, seen him irate and impatient from lack of food or sleep, but Sherlock heartbroken, Sherlock without John, that was something entirely different. He would not stand-by and watch his brother destroy himself over anything, even someone as worthy as John Watson.

He pulled out his phone, one hand still on Sherlock's shoulder.

Sherlock would be under full surveillance for no less than 48 hours following tonight. Sherlock was in no serious physical injury to warrant a hospital visit, but Mycroft knew it was the unseen wounds he needed to worry about. Although he was hesitant to call it a suicide watch—since it was easy enough for Sherlock to break his sober streak if it meant a distraction—that did not eliminate the more than probable risk of an intentional overdose on his part.

48 hours. Starting now.

"Sherlock."

A bath. He needed a bath. Something to get this dried sweat and smoke and dirt off of him. He needed to be clean.

Warily, Sherlock eyed Mycroft, who was currently typing away at his phone.

"If you wish to take a bath, Sherlock, then by all means do so, but if I do not hear from you within ten minutes of the tap being turned off then I will break the door down." Mycroft looked up at him solemnly. "Is that understood?"

Sherlock nodded. He didn't trust himself to speak.

"Oh, and Sherlock?"

He turned.

"I'm afraid I'm going to need your clothes." Mycroft said with something akin but not as sincere as a regretful smile.

Sherlock stared at him for a moment.

"I'm being quite serious." Mycroft reiterated. "And no need to feel ashamed since after all we were raised together. Nothing I haven't seen before."

Wordlessly, he began shedding his clothes in the middle of the room. Some part of him vaguely recognised that he had done this in front of John not 24 hours ago. Another part quietly noted that he'd never do it again.

He left the clothes where they fell in a dirty heap of soot and dirt and stalked to the bathroom. He shut the door, turning the tap on to the highest temperature, noting in his movements the streaks of red and black smudged on his skin.

He looked in the mirror as it fogged up, consuming his face. His hair was matted in thick patches by dirt, his cheeks coated with a thin gritty residue that was streaked through from dried tears. His eyes were red from smoke. Or so he told himself.

He turned the tap off. Heat steamed through the pristinely clean room. The cleanliness of it all made his head hurt.

He stepped into the bath.

It burned. The water boiled underneath him as he laid down, his skin bubbling and pink and raw as it burned away like flame eating at paper. His bones blackened as the heat licked away at him, his muscle and tendons and lean fat melting away. His mind screamed at him, his nerves prickling in self-preservation, screaming at him wrong wrong wrong too hot but he ignored it, ignored everything as he slid under the water.

It was so quiet. He could hear his heart beating. He remembered reading about anechoic chambers, in that other lifetime that included him. His vague interest in the fact that they'd drive anyone in it mad in an hour because their ears turned introspective when there wasn't any sound.

In his little chamber, he could feel his lungs burning, the bronchi within shrivelling from oxygen deprivation. He could hear his heart pounding and he wondered just how long he'd have to stay under for it to stop completely. Insanity in the chamber had been induced by the reminder of just how human they really were. Sherlock had found it fascinating. Now, as his stomach riled around seemingly in suspended momentum, he found it quite the opposite, and he burst to the surface just as he heard pounding on the door.

"Sherlock?" Mycroft's voice came from outside.

"I'm still alive, Mycroft." He bit out between breaths of air. Like he would waste his life away on something so painfully inadequate as drowning in a hotel bathtub. If he was bent on drowning—though he hadn't decided if that was the way to go yet—it would be out somewhere bigger, out where the stars would be the last thing he could see, where he could gaze up and hope that John would greet him on the other side, provided there was one. Was there an ocean near Sarajevo? How quickly could he get there?

Living without him, that was not an option.

Hot water dripped down his hair, trickling over his face.

He laid his head against the back of the tub and let himself burn.

After Mycroft had attempted to see him to bed like the overbearing mother hen that he was, Sherlock wondered if he'd ever feel normal again. Perhaps, after the drugs wore off, he might feel better. Perhaps then the drumming would stop. But he'd never feel normal again, not with that hole in his heart.

Mycroft soon appeared to realise that Sherlock, as exhausted as he was, was thinking far too much to slip into anything resembling an R.E.M. state and a man soon appeared, handing a syringe to his boss, who touched his hand to Sherlock's neck, feeling for his jugular. As he pressed the plunger, Sherlock's half-coherent attempt at a snide remark on drug dependence faded away.

He dreamed of his soldier, there in the fire. Saw his silhouetted form stand in the flames as smoke billowed around him, saw him standing there as he burned away to ash that scattered into the air. He reached out a hand, he called for Sherlock as if he was welcoming him home, and just as Sherlock reached him, he collapsed in a pile of ash. There'd been no body. No empirical proof that he'd ever existed—

When Sherlock woke, the space beside him was empty. He stared at it as the wind billowed into the room, ruffling the empty sheets where a body should be. He felt that same panic as the day when he had woken up alone instead of in his arms, a panic that hadn't subsided until his soldier had entered the room. Sherlock was in the middle of reaching his phone when he remembered that his army doctor was not there anymore, that he'd always be staring at a door that he was never to come through again.

It was as if he'd never even been there to begin with. As if he had truly been the Golem, created by some malevolent force and sent to Sherlock to love him, to make him believe that he might be loved by someone, before he burned away and turned to smoke, Sherlock's heart in his hand. From ash he was born, and so to which he would return.

It was stupid. Stupid. Yet, after the garage had fallen into cooling ash, he had sited through the remains, looking for any sign, for any echoes in his hollow chest that might lead him to find his heart in the debris.

But no. No. The way he had felt under Sherlock's hands, warm and soft, the way the sheets still smelled of sex and sweat and him, the way he had loved Sherlock, that couldn't—it had been too unspoiled, too real. He had been no counterfeit. Sherlock wished he could bottle it, that smell, to put it on swabs and capture that essence before it too faded away.

He barely remembered the first dream when he slipped into another. The day passed by in a drugged, exhausted haze of sleeping and waking, with Mycroft only bothering him with water or another dose of whatever it was that made him forget just what he'd lost. Sherlock welcomed it. He would raise his head blearily to the empty space on the bed beside him and vaugely recall that something was supposed to be there before he fell back once more into a heavy sleep.

Occassionally, he could hear voices.

"Just one body? Are you sure?" Mycroft sounded worried.

"Absolutely." A woman answered. Her voice was warm. Sherlock liked it. It sounded familiar.

Sometimes, he remembered his own.

"I lived my life before you and I lived it with you and I lived it after you, and only one of those periods was of any value to me."

He had meant what he said. He had tried to stop lying, if he had even lied at all. Only what he thought he couldn't handle. Only the minor technicalities. But his doctor had always been clever when it counted.

Sherlock didn't know who he'd been begging to, whom he'd prostrated himself before to spare his life, but whomever it was, they ignored him. He knew they would since he'd never been any shade of religious, a ghost in that crowd who only came to observe rituals that he found quite odd and pointless before he left, deemed that they had no beneficial merits, and never looked back.

He'd been secular, never religious in the slightest until he limped his way into Sherlock's life in a Holy Trinity of bad jumpers, psychosomatic wounds and steadfast morality. If he ever truly believed in anything or anyone other than himself, it was him. Just him. Always him. Believed in his inherent goodness, in his bravery, his loyalty, the fact that he held a gun as easily as a butter knife smeared in jam or a shampoo bottle if it meant protecting someone. Sherlock had never felt protected until his army doctor, always on his own, always relying on himself since Mycroft had grown into adolescence and found greater and better endeavours than coddling his younger brother.

Sherlock had been stupid, so incredibly stupid for trusting him, for loving him, for thinking that he might never die or at least if he did, it would be with Sherlock beside him so they could go together. He'd be lying if he said that he hadn't really considered what would happen if he died. His soldier's death was always a risk, but somehow they'd managed to avoid it through cunning, through cleverness, through sheer dumb luck.

"If we died together, I'd want to feel you one last time, anywhere I could get my hands on, at least before you were cold. I wouldn't want your warmth to go away."

Sherlock had never had the chance to touch him, to feel his chest rise and fall as they took their last breaths together, and that was the worst of it.

He never got to touch him but at least he hadn't been cold. He had been fire and heat and red-hot bone and melting flesh. His warmth had imploded inside him like a dying star.

A notion that his mind was trying to convince him was supposed to be comforting.

Was this what a crisis in faith felt like? He could only suppose that was it. His loss of the one sacrosanct thing in his whole life had been too large, had meant too much, and now what was he left with? An empty hotel room that he would certainly vacate within five hours (during his exile he had learned in Hong Kong never to stay longer than just to sleep and perhaps shower), loneliness, and a new person to dedicate himself to so he might destroy them as they had him.

He felt a bitter, empty grin.

In his death, those responsible had sealed their own, for now Sherlock had no morality to live by.

He was free to pursue with all of his great and terrible being.

He was not able to leave the hotel. Mycroft had made sure of it. Did he know what Sherlock was planning? Probably not. He most likely thought that Sherlock would kill himself at the first chance he got. A few hours ago, he would have been right. Now though, now Sherlock had some other business to take care of first.

Someone knocked on the door. Mycroft went to open it. He knew Sherlock wouldn't move.

"Sherlock?" He called out. "You have a visitor."

Mycroft, if you honestly think I'd want to see anyone other than him then I—

"You." Sherlock did not shout, did not raise his voice, but his whisper was like razor wire, slicing through the room, hoarse from its idleness.

Mary Morstan stood in front of him.

As he moved to attack, Mycroft moved in front of her.

"Mycroft—" Sherlock's voice cracked. "Get—get away."

"Sherlock, she has something to say to you. Things you should know. Will you listen?"

Sherlock's murderous gaze indicated that he would do anything but.

"No," Mycroft added quietly. "She is not responsible for John's death. That honour belongs to the late Sebastian Moran who, if you recall, John managed to take with him."

Sherlock stared at his brother, his hands shaking at his sides. Mycroft sensed his collapse before he did and helped him to the bed.

"He's been…weak." He heard Mycroft explain to Mary. "Quite weak." Then something else, "Drug…not fully left his system."

Mary murmured something that sounded like understanding. Noise rang in Sherlock's ears like a monitor flatlining.

Mycroft stepped out to answer a suspiciously timed phone call, leaving the two alone.

Mary did not sit beside him, but stood opposite. He was grateful. He didn't want to be near her.

"Why?" He asked quietly.

"Sherlock?" Her voice was too soft, too solemn, too unlike the cold sharpness he'd heard in the factory.

"Why?" He repeated.

Silence. He realised he hadn't been talking out loud.

"Moran had risen to high ranks in the agency." She explained quietly. "He had secrets, state secrets and personal. Moriarty taught him well." She added, the acidity of the name stinging her tongue.

Sherlock's head twitched at the name, as if to rid his thoughts of it.

"Sometimes cancerous tumours are incorrectly diagnosed as malignant." Mary replied to his unvoiced question. "We didn't know what he was—who he was—until it was too late."

"Last night—you knew so much—"

Had he spoken out loud or was it in his head? He couldn't tell.

"Your brother asked me to convince you of my treachery." Mary said, offering a solemn smile. "Do you really think he would hire someone that didn't know how to bluff?"

"And Anthea?" He was almost certain he had spoken now.

Mary smiled kindly. "Do you really think I go by just one name? One face?" She fiddled with the straps of her purse. "Mycroft warned me once that you had a habit of undervaluing the things that mattered most."

"Mycroft can go choke on a fistful of cake for all the good he'd done for me."

He hadn't spoken, but judging by how Mary read his face, he may as well have.

"Yes, Sherlock, he has done good for you. Look at what's he's done. Look at how he's protected you."

"Protected me?" Sherlock shouted, turning to rear his wrath upon her. "By doing what, exactly? By letting my—" my earth, my entirety—"My colleague be employed by an international assassination agency? Did he think it was in my best interest not to let me know that he was murdering people because it helped him process my death? Did Mycroft think it was protecting, letting him be drugged into reliance on a seizure medication he didn't need? By letting him be tortured? By letting him—letting him—"

Burn.

Sherlock couldn't finish although he knew quite well the difference between couldn't and wouldn't.

He couldn't.

Mary sat beside him where he'd collapsed against the bed.

The room was silent, none of his words hanging in the air simply because he hadn't said them. To Mary's eyes, he had stood and turned to look at her with an expression of such hatred and grief that she couldn't imagine how she'd once thought him to be inhuman. He stared at her until he was trembling, until she could see his eyes glisten and his hands clench into fists.

"I know what John meant to you, Sherlock, and all the times I talked to him, I could see how much you meant to him. Even though you were gone, he never stopped thinking about you. Never stopped telling me stories. Did you know that? Every time we met in the Drop-Off after a hit, he would talk about you. I think it made him feel better, made him feel…safer." Sherlock had his face buried in his hands. She reached into her purse. "He told me once that if you came back and he wasn't there, he wanted you to have this. He always believed in you, you know, even before he was sure you were alive, and—and I think he'd want you to do the same for him. To remember him." She sighed and Sherlock vaguely recalled that she'd cared for his army doctor too. But he had not been her world as he'd been Sherlock's. He had not been her reason to rise in the morning or to jump to her death or to track an international web of criminals. No, he had not been hers as he'd been Sherlock's.

He heard Mary run a hand over something.

"I know this is—it can't make up for what you've lost, but I hope it reminds you that he loved you, Sherlock, more than anything." Quietly, she laid a box in his lap. "You are loved, Sherlock…you are so loved." She said softly, brushing a hand at his temple before standing and leaving the room.

Sherlock waited until he heard the door shut to lift his head. It was a wonder he could even do that. But the promise that something of his remained, something that was all Sherlock's and no one else's, it was too enticing to ignore.

It was a simple thing, the box. Pinewood, engraved with his initials. J.H.W. A box for souvenirs, for things of personal importance. Something he'd wanted Sherlock to have.

He opened it, his fingers shaking as they dipped into the box.

His gun, standard army issue, Browning L9A1. He knew from the event at the pool that John liked to keep his firearms according to what felt most comfortable. Small, powerful, did its job any way you asked it to. So fitting.

He placed the gun beside him on the bed. The box was so much lighter now. He didn't want to reach in again, didn't want this discovery to end, he wanted it to be infinite, to know that there would always be more of his soldier to uncover, yet soon he found that his hand scraped the bottom and for a moment he panicked. Surely that couldn't be all he had to remember him by. There was so much more that defined him than a gun, something that reeked of the humanistic desire to assert itself.

Something clinked against the corner of the box.

He pulled them out, twin metal circles dangling from the chain wrapped around his hand. His dogtags.

O POS

P 74214183

WATSON

JOHN H.

OTHER

Other. That was unexpected, although in a way it really wasn't. He had never discussed his religion with Sherlock and so he'd assumed it was Church of England or some other typical venture. Of course he'd still surprise Sherlock; of course he'd still be a mystery. Too uncertain to check the Atheist or Agnostic box on something that would feel so permanent and too undecided to check something more defining. Fascinating.

He slipped them on. Took a deep breath. Reached into the box for the last time.

A note.

Some part of me knew it would end like this, but the rest of me didn't want to believe it. Hopefully you'll never read this, but if you are then I'm sorry, for a lot of things, but mainly that we weren't what we should have been when you were here, and now we never will be. I always knew you'd come back though. My therapist would call it wishful thinking but I think I'd call it faith. Faith that you'd return to me one day. But if you have and I'm not there, this gun is for the times when you absolutely need it—emergencies, alright?—not just when you're bored. Mrs Hudson would not forgive you for the new holes in the wall.

I'm still here. It's not forever. It doesn't mean I've left you.

I've always wanted to end a letter like this, and I guess now is the best time for you to know:

I love you,

John

PS – Forgive me for the state of 221B, and whatever surprises you may find. People do strange things when they're lonely and in love.

Sherlock barely had time to process the note, much less the postscript, when he felt the chain of the dogtags being twisted behind him. He lashed out, struggling to reach whomever it was that was choking him, but they kept their grip tightly on the chain. He could feel their breath on his neck.

The sunlight was warm on his face, shining through the window in front of him. It felt nice. The metal cut into his neck. The fates had been merciful, allowing him only one day away from him before taking pity on him and letting Sherlock join him. He'd be glad to. He stopped struggling, letting his hands fall away. He'd make this an easy job for whoever it was. His heart pounded as he shut his eyes.

John. It wasn't forever, but it felt like it. John. Wait for me.

There was a crack, a sudden high pitched whistle as something sliced through the air. The chain loosened. He felt something hot dripping down the back of his neck as he dropped to the floor. His body sucked in great gasps of air although he didn't want it to. A door banged open. Someone called his name.

He opened his eyes. The light hurt. His throat hurt. His heart ached. Someone stood above him, silhouetted against the sunlight pouring into the room.

"John?" He smiled. "John, I—"

"Breathe, Sherlock, just breathe."

His heart dropped.

Mycroft. Not him. Not his soldier. Mycroft.

He scrambled up to his feet, the ground cresting in waves beneath him as his vision cleared and he looked down.

His attacker, dead behind him. A bullet in his throat. Clean entry. Blackened halos from the gunpowder already forming on burnt, bloody skin.

He turned his gaze.

Crack in the glass, signifying the bullet that tore through it. And the angle of the wound in his throat—

He was suddenly reminded of his analysis of the gunshot that killed the cabbie, the event that affirmed his soldier's presence in Sherlock's life.

"A kill shot over that distance, from that kind of a weapon…"

No. Impossible.

Sherlock rushed to the window, leaning as far out of it as he could without risking Mycroft's already spiking concern. He counted the windows up and across until he arrived at the correct angle.

Give me something. Give me anything. A flash of a rifle being packed away. The shine of blonde hair. The rim of a cap. An old biker jacket. Anything.

He stared at the window where nothing moved behind it. Stared at it until he felt Mycroft gently pull him back.

"Sherlock, I've already sent someone to look." He said in a tone that suggested for him not to be hopeful.

Sherlock felt his heart race.

He sat on the bed, ignoring a corpse for the first time in his life. Wasn't much of a mystery though, as he'd been there when he'd died. Boring case. He must have been sent by the agency, revenge for both agents on the only man left who could be accounted for it. Despite what Mycroft had earlier claimed, that he was in charge of the agency, Sherlock rather doubted it, or at least that his control was omnipotent. He hadn't known about this, hadn't been prepared, or else he never would have left Sherlock alone, never let him within sight of a window. Someone else had ordered this, someone that had gone undetected under Mycroft's nose. But who, then, had killed his attacker? Someone that had suspected the hit. Someone that knew of Moran's vitriol, his great revenge. Someone that did not want Sherlock Holmes dead.

Mycroft warned him not to hope, but since when had he ever stopped Sherlock from doing something when he truly wanted to?

He smiled.

The game was afoot.

It's over!

Wow. The feeling is...it's quite surreal. I started working on this all the way back in February and now it's done...LUCKILY I have the sequel and "Come Back" to keep me busy!

Thank you to everyone who reviewed and showed this some love, I really owe this story to you because if it hadn't had an audience, it wouldn't have been continued. Thank you for loving this like you did!

Special thanks to Fuse Action for being fucking beautiful in every sense of the word (and reviewing almost every chapter, Jesus Christ, balls of steel, this woman).