I'm a ghost of a girl
That I want to be most
I'm the shell of a girl
That I used to know well
Sherlock leaves again. She didn't even know of the crime he was going to commit. She wonders if it should have bothered her, the lack of his confidence in her, because it doesn't.
He says his goodbyes, but hers doesn't hurt as much as John's and even Mary's, seems to. Perhaps all for the better, because he is back in hours. Hours, in which Moriarty too shows that he is not quite gone, even if he is dead. There is some irony in his return and his description of 'Jim from IT', that she cannot quite bring herself to laugh at, over the conditioned panic that builds in her throat. She remembers Sherlock describing him like a spider...with extensions of his web in places no one ever cared to look.
It is the same, scattered, seemingly endless web that takes Mary as its prey only months later, she supposes.
But Sherlock does not reply to her suspicions, when she asks about it. She knows better than to ask John. As for the elder Holmes, well. She wonders if their relationship is anything more than a cursory acquaintance, anymore. So she resigns herself to a not-quite-blissful ignorance about the circumstances regarding Mary's death.
But she sees them seething with a hidden something. She sees something looming over them, through the cases. When the news about the Culverton Smith affair breaks, she wonders if it is that which has been terrifying them. For a second, she believes the man, the stranger on the TV, who tells her that her old friend is a madman. After all, what does she really know about him? Then, reminding herself of rationality, she pushes the thoughts away. Sherlock solves the case, as he always does. Everything comes together in the end...except it doesn't, because something is still very, very wrong, and this is not the disaster she is terrified of.
She sees the storm coming, for all of them, Sherlock, John, and him, but it is not the storm she thinks it is. She watches, from a distance. For that is what has grown between her and the rest of them, an unfathomable distance. From no fault of theirs or hers, really. They just live in a different world. A world such that she is right there, hovering around it, maintaining the farce of closeness, but never feeling so far apart.
Then, she hears the news. Mrs Hudson, hysterical, terrified. The men, all of them, missing. She feels like the air has been sucked right out of her.
Notes: A long-delayed chapter, sorry about that! I intend to make this version compliant with S4, unlike the original (which was written before S4 came out), hence the slight changes in storyline, which really shouldn't make that much of a difference overall.
(Original found at: (fanfiction).net(slash)s/11953837/1/Irises )
The song lyrics at the beginning are from Christina Perri's "The Lonely".