"John," she called out her voice cracking at him. He sat in a chair in the hospital. He looked miserable. Tears were falling down his face as his head sat in his hands. He was a defeated man. "John," she said again running to him. "John, where is he? John, where's Sherlock?" John looked up to her. He opened to mouth to tell her, but he just shook his head looking back to the ground. "No," she muttered backing away. She collided with a table and collapsed to the ground in disbelief. No tears were shed from her eyes. She didn't believe it could be true.
She insisted upon it; it was her choice. She had to see it for herself, or she would never believe it. She would believe he faked his death as many had done in the past including herself. So, Jen slowly walked into the morgue at Saint Bart's; she wasn't sure she could walk the hospital again not knowing just stories above her was were Sherlock jumped and just yards away from the very door she walked in every morning, Sherlock's blood marred the sidewalk. She didn't think she could do it, walk into Saint Bart's every day knowing. Molly watched her with a stone solid expression. Jen had no interest in analyzing it. Fidgeting just a little, Molly pulled back the sheet that covered him.
It had been hours since declared dead, but the blood was already washed off him, and he looked all in one piece. His face was pale; though it always was, this time it was the color of death. His face was relaxed as if he was sleeping; he could have been sleeping. It was Sherlock; it was definitely him but not him. Sherlock Holmes was wired; this man was… was lifeless. With shaky fingers, Jen put her two fingers to his pulse line. It was dead. Completely dead. Lifeless. Breathless. Inanimate. Cadaverous. How many ways could she say dead before it finally sunk in?
"Jen," Molly whispered ever so slightly, but she didn't speak; she couldn't speak. Tears slipped down her face and fell onto him as her hair was choked out of her. Her hand gripped his, and she shook it and shook it as if trying to wake him finally she started screaming getting no response.
"You promised! You promised you wouldn't leave me!" Molly pulled her from his body, and Jen collapsed sobbing. "Come back," she whispered crying into her hands now rocking back and forth as her body shuttered. "Please come back; I'll do anything, Sherlock, just come back. I'll even say you're the cleverest man in world… in the universe. All you have to do is come back." Jen curled herself into a ball against the wall trying to keep the pieces of herself together. She hadn't felt this sort of pain… well, she wasn't sure she ever felt pain like this. It was white and blinding, and she didn't want to move; she couldn't move. She wanted to die; she felt like she was dying. "Just come back," she whispered as John ran into the morgue having been hailed by Molly. "Just come back. You promised."
"How is she?" Mrs. Hudson asked as they stood at Sherlock's grave. Jen didn't come. She hadn't been seen in a week; she just held up in her room.
"Damon says the only reason he knows she's alive is her crying," John replied. "Sherlock's death… it tore her apart. She quit Bart's. Says she can't stand the place. She hasn't talked to anyone. I've never seen her like that… in the morgue. Whenever she can't handle an emotion, it would just turn to anger but… not this time. This time she was hopeless. It was terrifying; she's the stronger person I know. What if… she never gets better?"
"Give her some time," Mrs. Hudson said. "She'll get better."
"It doesn't look that way."
She soaked in her tub letting tears fall down her face. It had been days since Sherlock's death, but the wound that manifested in her wasn't dulling, not even a little. She had spent her days mulling over everything that had happened between her and Sherlock, spent her days mulling over every feeling that had ever occurred between the two. It was a hard and daunting process, and one she wasn't sure she was entirely ready to face, but she did. She was at the end of her thoughts on the subject, but the conclusion was nagging at her and her conscious wouldn't allow her to accept it.
She pushed herself under the water and opened her eyes allowing her mind to see the glowing blur of a light on her ceiling as she pushed her self-conscious forward and her conscious back to understand. She thought back to things that mattered.
In that moment, under the water, she found what she was looking for. She realized that her nagging and arguing heavily outweighed the praise she gave him and vice versa, but despite that, the positive emotions deeply outweighed anything negative she felt for him. She thought about the things that really matter when it comes to silly things like love like trying to make the other feel better when they're down and accepting a person at their worst and realized very simply that they did those things for each other.
She choked on the water as she needed air, but she wasn't done thinking. In fact, she would have rather stay underwater and let her lungs burn for oxygen as the blurry light about her turned to darkness then admit what she desperately tried to not to admit, tried so hard not to do, but she couldn't. She wouldn't, so she broke the surface of the water gasping for breath before she curled her knees to her chest and sobbed harder than she had the last few days as she realized how very much in love she was with Sherlock Holmes.
When she pulled herself from the bath and wrapped a robe around her figure, she stared at the sickly woman in the mirror. She looked like a ghost of her normal self. She was placid and gauntly. She hadn't eaten or slept in days; she was shaking as if she was recovering from some sort of narcotics. She looked small and scared like a cornered child; she hardly recognized herself. She couldn't let this control her life; she couldn't let this become her. Jen took a shaky breath leaning into the sink and looking at its too white surface. In times of death, one had to move on but always remember. She would remember him and everything that happened, but she had to move on. That was life; when faced with tragedy, you only had to choices: rise above it, or let the tragedy consume you and everything you are.
But she would need some sort of closure, and she knew that, so she dressed in the green jumper he liked and made her way up to the apartment of John Watson… and the former Sherlock Holmes. John was slowly packing his own things up. He couldn't remain in the apartment; she didn't blame him. Mrs. Hudson would have to move on of course. That meant giving away Sherlock's things, and people would move in Sherlock's flat, and she just couldn't allow that. It seemed unfair to his memory. Her smile flickered as she looked at the dead man's violin that he put her to sleep with one night that seemed so long ago. She knocked gently before walking in.
"Jen," he said surprised to see her up and about. Her hands slowed ghosted passed items in the flat as she approached him. "What are you doing up here?"
"Do you want to know how we first met?" she asked John with a sad smile as her hand slid gently over the books. "I was friends with some troubled students, but there was this one: Connor Waite. He was a psychopath… the students… they were cruel to Sherlock. They called him a freak, and they were just so mean to him when he didn't deserve it. Connor invited Sherlock to a small drug party in my dorm. He told Sherlock that the cocaine he took was ten percent purity when it was fifty. He overdosed, and I came back to the dorm to them discussing where to dump his body. I revived him the best I could and threw my friends out of the dorm to take care of him."
"It's why he thought he owed you," John noted. Jen smiled and nodded.
"But he didn't owe me," she told him, "because he saved me. A few months after his accident, Connor approached me at night, and… he tried to rape me, and so I took a baseball bat to his head. Killed him. I left the school knowing I would be charged with his murder, but Sherlock covered it up. Never got charged, but any minute he could have turned me in. Never did. I suppose he feared I could have ratted him out too," she muttered. "I suppose if it had come out that Sherlock Holmes covered up a murder they'd begin to wonder how many murders he had covered up."
"So… why… why did you think you owed him? You two sounded pretty even to me," John told her not quite understanding.
"I didn't want to be even," she told him with a smile. "If we were even, he'd forget me, and I'm selfish. I wanted to imprinted into Sherlock Holmes's memory. It's all I wanted, because I wanted to be the woman who got under his skin, to be stuck in his brilliant mind. It was wrong of me to want that."
"I think he wanted you there, Jen," John commented. "I think you just… you made him feel human, and he resented it, but at the same time, it was a desire of his. If he didn't hope he would meet you one day, he would have deleted you from his mind long ago." Jen smile gently as John picked up his box. "I'm going to get going," he said kissing her cheek. "I think… I think it'll be okay, Jen… in the end, it'll be okay."
"Thank you John," she said with a slight smile as he left her to continue her journey around the flat.
It was odd for her though not unfamiliar. She was angrier at Sherlock than she was sad. She was mad, because he promised he wouldn't leave her and he did. He took his own life and that was the worse insult she could be given.
"Why couldn't you just keep your promise to me you stupid, arrogant man?" she muttered her hand passing over the skull. She picked it up in her hand looking at it thoughtfully as she spoke to it. "I thought I could keep you. Was that so selfish of me? I loved you, you know? I really mean that. I loved everything about, and dear lord, I hated everything about you. You were such a bastard, but I loved you." She paused as her phone went off. Sighing, she put the skull down and looked down at her phone that had been sitting in her coat pocket ignored since Sherlock's death. She had dozens of texts from various people asking her about her state and about Sherlock, and she slowly went through them before she got to the end to see an unread text from Sherlock just moments before his fall. Shaking, Jen opened the text.
Sorry, I won't be making it home tonight, Ginny. -SH
Tears fell onto the screen, but she quickly wiped them away. She couldn't cry over Sherlock Holmes forever. She would do something, something that needed to be done. She sent out several texts to a number of people to meet her later that day before she grabbed her jacket and made to go to the hardware store.
"Jen?" John asked as he watched her approach with five strangers. John was in a small gathering of people. It was him, Lestrade, Molly, Damon, and Myra. "What's going on?"
"I wanted to do something for Sherlock," she told them, "and I thought about what to do. The five of us, as well as a few others, know the truth about Sherlock Holmes. He wasn't a fraud, and I don't know if I believe in a heaven or hell, but I don't believe he could just stop existing. He's Sherlock Holmes, and he's too stubborn to not exist out their somewhere. More importantly though, I want his enemies and his doubters to know that people still believe in him."
"What are you planning?" John asked. Jen took out a yellow spray can and showed them.
"I'm going to graffiti the whole of London with the words 'I believe in Sherlock Holmes.' They're going to help me," she said nodding to the five behind her. "They're the main branch of Sherlock's homeless network, the Baker Street Irregulars. They're going to pass out cans to everyone in the network. By morning, no building will be without yellow paint. Help me."
"I work for Scotland Yard," Lestrade reminded her.
"And you're going to help us," she told him, "because you believed him just as much as John and I." She held out the bag with yellow cans in it. Everyone took one including Lestrade. "Leave no building unmarked." With that, she ran off, and John had a flicker of a smile as he looked at the paint can in his hand.
John and Jen sat together on the steps of the National Museum looking out over London. Everywhere they looked, no building was unmarked with the yellow paint, and even though the world would be left without him making it a darker place, this seemed to be a start of a new era. Jen was smoking a cigarette after a long night, and John was drinking a beer hoping it would take the edge off. It was doing no good.
"What now?" John asked her. She looked at him and smiled before giving him the newspaper. There on the front page was a picture of Jen and Sherlock laughing apparently at each other as they weren't looking at the camera. They obviously didn't know it was being taken. It was different from any of the ones the paparazzi took as it was clear from their faces how very much they cared about each other. He didn't recognize where they were, but he imagined it was on one of those dates that weren't dates. The headline read simply: 'I believe in Sherlock Holmes.' And there it was, an article dedicated to Sherlock written by Jen.
I believe in Sherlock Holmes. It seems so simple of a phrase, and I'm sure I'll be asked for years to come if he was a fake or if I truly did believe in him. I'll clear that up right now. He wasn't a fake, and I did- and will always- believe in Sherlock Holmes.
I, Ginevra Lorraine, organized the graffiti of London, so that his enemies will know that they haven't won. They will never win as there will always be people loyal to him. But more importantly, I wanted him to know that he was loved. He was loved by many, and despite being the biggest prat you would ever have had the displeasure to meet, he was the most brilliant, incredible human to ever walk among us. The world will be a darker place without him.
I have been accused of being many things to Sherlock Holmes including his girlfriend, and while that isn't true, I did love him. I loved him dearer than I could even possibly imagine I could, but the epiphany that I loved him wholly, with everything I had, came too late. It came the moment I realized that he was going to kill himself. In that single moment all I could think was: dear Lord, no. Not him. I arrived there as fast as I could, but it was too late. Sherlock Holmes was dead, and I was left in shambles.
Two weeks have passed since he died, and I've come to realize the very depth of both hate and love for that man for I wanted to ring his neck just as much as I wanted to hold him. I think in time the hate I had felt for Sherlock Holmes will disappear, but I believe that the love I feel for that man won't fade. It'll always be lodged in me, and that is just the worst… but it's also the best.
So, my fellow Londoners, I ask this of you. I want you to scream and shout, and demand to be heard. I want you to tell New Scotland Yard and the press and all the doubters that Sherlock Holmes was a genius. I want you to tell them you believe in Sherlock Holmes! I want you to tell them that Moriarty was real! I want you to tell them you fight John Watson's war, and you will not stop fighting until they see the truth!
And ladies and gentlemen, I want you to know that if you ever need a consulting detective or just want to let me know you believe all you have to do is look for me. I've taken up the Holmes' legacy, and though I cannot guarantee I'll be as good as him, I can guarantee I'll try. My name Ginevra Lorraine, consulting detective. The address is 221B Baker Street, and not only do I believe in Sherlock Holmes, but I'm in love with him. Lord have mercy on me.
John smiled giving Jen the paper back before taking a sip of his beer; she took it and threw it on the ground next to her not bothering to glance at it.
"I'm sorry," John told her. She shook her head before taking a drag of her cigarette and replying as the smoke was blown out lifting in the air and flowing up to the sky.
"It's alright," she told him with a smile. "I loved him, but… it just wasn't meant to be, I suppose. I have loved two men in my life. I had to kill the first with my own hand, and this… this hurts more. It shouldn't, but… he was ripped from me before I could even tell him. It's unfair how some people get decades together, and what do I get? We weren't even together."
"Yes, you were," John argued as she took another drag. She frowned and looked to be questioning him. "You could deny it all you wanted, but you two went out together all the time."
"So? People do that," she argued.
"Not Sherlock and besides, you didn't see the way that he looked at you," John laughed recalling all the times he caught Sherlock just staring at her.
"Oh yeah, and how was that?" she laughed.
"With complete confusion," he told her making her laugh, "and utter fascination and sometimes, he would look at you in complete awe and admiration. I think he loved you, and he just didn't know what he was feeling."
"Thanks, John," she told him with a sigh as she stood.
"Where are you going?" John asked her.
"To the flower shop," she said thoughtfully thinking about it, "and then to Sherlock's graves. After that, I think I'm going to go visit Mycroft and see if he can at least get the criminal charges dropped for all this graffiti I owned up to in the paper. It's the least he could do."
"Sherlock would hate that you decided to put something as boring as flowers at his grave," John warned her as she stomped out her cigarette. She gave him a mocking smile before she went skipping down the steps shouting as people began coming out and walking the streets.
"I believe in Sherlock Holmes!"
A/N: Last chapter before the epilogue! I recommended that you all go watch the first episode of series 3. If you have no found it online due to being in a different country, I recommend going to the site: tv-links .eu (no space) and looking under the comments. There you'll find comments hidden for spam, and for the most part, if you unhide them you'll find links! Be wary of any pops and anything that says you need to install something, download, or update something. Years of having had to watch Merlin on these sites have paid off in navigation. Also, if it's slow to load, just let it sit. This is the price one pays to have to watch it on sketchy sites.
Anyway, in other news, we have some pictures up that will be updated on a regularish basis. Those are on the profile that will lead you to photobucket.
And lastly, I had two votes of potential problems with an M rating, but for the most part I have received quite the encouragement. So I offer this solution: I can warn of reasons for potential M chapters at the beginning. As the increase in rating isn't just for sexual content but actually quite the increase in violence... a necessary change. So unless there is an absolutely necessary, completely valid reason not to rate it M, speak now or forever hold your peace. Oh, my first M-rated story. This'll be fun.
Thanks to all the reviewers! There were so many of you! Thanks to TheIceManandTheVirgin, TinkerbellxO, short-skirtbluescarf, Dream01, .okumura, Anon, SemiraBlake, Protagonist of Life, Tragicblossoms, hannahhobnob, and kawaiixkisses. Thank you for all the guesses of the future and confusion! I enjoy confusion. We'll see how everything plays out in the next Ginlock tale!
Oh! One more thing, sequel title has changed. I keep switching, but I made the cover for it already so it's sticking: A Fire To Be Reignited. Let you make what you will with that. You can see the cover of it up on photobucket already! ^.^ See Wednesday night with the prologue and the epilogue!