Goodbye my lover
Goodbye my friend
You have been the one
You have been the one for me
His expression, something about it, knocks the air out of her lungs. An old echo, something Sherlock used to say, comes back to her.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
The impossible... that Reg would have been so cruel. Or so careless. For him, the two words were almost enmeshed.
The improbable... she still can not wrap her head around it. But it must be. It would make sense. She frowns. Has he been using a glamour for all his life? No. That would be far too consuming. A more likely theory: he wore a glamour when they met before.
Something hurts in her, when she realises she never saw his face before. But now. She sees it now. She looks at the man towering above her, surrounded by the dust and yellowed paper and old tomes. She sees an old light in his face.
"Dr. Hooper, I am not a fool," he repeats. There are some tears in his eyes, but not enough to fall. He is crumbling like a sand castle crushed under the waves of years of pain and regret.
"Fools are too foolish to believe a lie they want to believe in," she counters. Her own hands are shaking, hidden only by her balled fists. Her heightened senses pick up the faint scent of irises in the room, as if kept once, long ago, and since forgotten.
The mask falls apart completely.
"Why?" he asks, his voice barely a whisper. The single syllable sounds as though he is holding up the weight of worlds.
She knows it is the question he has been wanting to ask for years. The question he could not ask that night so long ago.
"I could not bear it. It was too much." The truth, concisely put.
She wants nothing more right now than to run into his arms. To hold him close and tell him everything. But they are not that anymore. They are different people, in a different world.
When she looks up again, the familiarity has faded away. There is determination there instead. A hard set to his face that terrifies her.
"Reg?" she asks. She feels her stomach drop as his hand closes in a soft fist. One of his rings, the one she has never seen Mycroft Holmes without, blurs and reshapes, until his fist is closed around a old but surprisingly unused wand.
She does not have time to back up, before his quick reflexes have her staring down the end of the wand.
"Reg," she says again. This time, a plea. Her feet feel like stone, impossible to move. "Please."
"Obliviate," he whispers, and her last thought is whether she imagined the pain in his voice.
Notes: Finally complete! I deviated from the original because this seemed to fit better. Perhaps I will regret these decisions and come back and rewrite it 5 years from now, when my writing is better. Who knows :) It is also for this reason I decided not to delete the old version.
(Original found at: .net(slash)s/11953837/1/Irises )
The song lyrics at the beginning are from James Blunt's "Goodbye My Lover".