= Part One:  The Prologue =

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Rating:   PG-13 -- for violence, language, and mature (?) themes.
Disclaimer:  I don't own Sherlock, but Shannon is mine.
Dedication: For S.B.B., my very own Shannon Holmes.
Warnings: Nothing yet -- check back later once more chapters've been written.
A/N: I'm Looking for a good beta-reader to criticize, edit, encourage, etc.  If you're interested, I'd love to hear from you -- shanlock@raistland.com.  On with the show!
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I met Holmes when I was fifteen, and I didn't have enough sense then to realize what I was getting myself into.  It's taken me longer than I care to admit to understand exactly what's going on – and that only after years have passed, tears have fallen, and bullets have been fired.  Nothing like a little blood to make you really see for the first time what you've had all along.

But I'm starting at the ending.  My name is Sarah Watson, and in the tradition of all the Watsons who came before me, I'm writing down my story so far.  Let's start at the beginning.

*          *          *

High school was difficult for me.  I'd thought I wanted to be a doctor ever since I was in kindergarten, but after a bad experience at our local hospital, I changed my mind.  I turned my back on medicine for once and for all, cracked open my mother's dusty poetry anthologies, and turned my feet onto a path that would eventually lead me to becoming a college professor.  A college professor of English.

My parents were crushed.  My father, Patrick Watson, was a pediatric surgeon at Mercy.  My grandfather was a pediatrician, and his father before him was a general practitioner.  Both of my uncles are in medicine as well, and in fact out of all my cousins, only one or two have made other career plans.  My only brother, three years my junior, suffers from severe schizophrenia and, though able to have a good life and a steady job, would never be able to carry on the family tradition by becoming an M.D.  My mother, Anne Turner Watson, with a long-suffering sigh, put away her dreams of retiring to her daughter's rich country estate and began working overtime.

It was in my freshman year that I killed my parents' hopes.  I dropped my math classes and my skirts, donning instead a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses and an equally worn pair of men's jeans.  I took to wearing t-shirts instead of pink fuzzy sweaters – my mother's idea of what girls should keep in a wardrobe.  I hated her for it at the time; she tried until her last day to make me more feminine.  When she passed away in a car crash that spring, my resentment of her faded but my resolve tripled; I threw away everything pink I owned.

I didn't make many friends. I go to Memorial High here in town, a school full of jocks and budding zealots – not a comforting atmosphere for a literary tomboy who grew up in an atheist household.  I didn't believe in God then – and I suppose I still don't, though my beliefs in general have changed since those years.  But that's another story altogether.

My junior year met me with few friends. I was a quiet, bookish girl who made good grades and stayed mostly out of the eye of the public.  At the time, I liked to think I had a lot to say, that the problem lay with a lack of able listeners.

And Shannon was certainly a listener; she picked everything up like a sponge, though she did a good deal of talking herself.  I met her as the girl who sat behind me in my junior biology class, and we spent the greater part of first semester arguing over religion and history and everything in between – though we avoided the topics of fashion, boys, and politics like the plague.  It was a mutual decision.  I suppose she was my first true best friend – that is, friend who knew me not for my reputation but for my own thoughts and personality.  We both had our own obsessions – mine with a hundred dead poets, hers with all things Sherlockian.  For the most part, we each respected the other's oddities and generally we got along famously, except for a few vicious spats when we discovered we disagreed completely in matters of both romance and music.

"Beethoven?" she asked me incredulously one dreary afternoon.  We were in the middle of a lecture over the virtues of zebra mussels, and we were (theoretically) trying to keep quiet and not disturb class. 

"Shhh!" I hissed.  Despite my growing knack for rebellion, our biology teacher was a particularly frightening man with a short temper and a neck as thick as my thighs.

"Beethoven?" she repeated more quietly, her tone still acidic.  "You've got to be kidding me, Sarah!"

*          *          *

At this point in time, we were still on a first-name basis.  (It sounds strange, but realize –Holmes just doesn't do very many things the orthodox way.) She explained it to me once:  "Watson," she said, "I don't believe it's important to remember more than one name when I first meet somebody, and so I hang onto the first title I'm told.  Usually a first name.  If I decide you're worth the time, I might pick up your nickname."  She paused and looked at me with an amused flicker in her eyes. "And if you're truly my friend, I'll call you by your last name, which is ultimately the most important."

*          *          *

"Yes, Beethoven," I replied with a straight face.  "I'm dead serious," I added.  I felt another heated discussion coming on, and smiling now would be a one-way ticket to losing ground before we'd hardly begun.  Arguing with Shannon was a good way to spend time; she was damn smart, though her grades certainly didn't show it.  She thought her classes were boring, and aside from a mental block when it came to math, her failure to make good marks was a direct result of her lack of attention.

But, as it turned out, this wasn't just a heated discussion.  I said Beethoven, she said Chopin; I added Mozart, she countered with Debussy; one thing led to another, and before I knew it, we weren't speaking.  The same thing happened when we stumbled onto the topic of love.

"I do not now, and never will," she declared in a level tone, "believe in 'love' as anything more than a series of chemical reactions and a state of mind."  I disagreed vehemently, the argument dragged on, and when we finally agreed to disagree, we were so sick of each other that we didn't talk for a week.

It sounds ridiculous, I know – but Shannon has always gone at everything, and I do mean everything, with the full force of all her passions.  She believes in everything she says, and she'll hold to her beliefs with everything she's got. She's not closed-minded, she's eerily well thought-out. And so, sometimes, all it takes is a spark to light a fire under her that'll burn from here to Hades before you're through.  She's intense, and I mean that in every sense of the word.  In a conversation, she'll run you through hoops before she's even said hello.  She's impossible to read; for the three months I first knew her, I never heard her laugh and saw her smile only once or twice.  Trying to imagine Shannon Holmes in tears was like trying to write with the wrong end of a pen – it just won't work, and the more you try, the dumber you look.  I guess the challenge is half the charm.

She still called me Sarah, and I called her Shannon.  To be honest, I wouldn't have been able to tell you what her last name was if it hadn't been for her interest and my resulting education in the world of Sherlock Holmes.  The irony of the last names – hers as Holmes and mine as Watson – stuck with me almost immediately.

We only saw each other in class, at lunch, and around the halls.  Still, I thought of her as a friend.  Maybe not someone I'd stay friends with after we stopped having junior biology together, but someone I could count on for a chat or to help with a research paper in a pinch.

That all changed over Christmas, when my father died.

*          *          *

My parents had waited until their late thirties to have children, and that meant they were both hitting fifty by the time I made it to high school.  My mother's accident happened when I was thirteen, and though my father's health was perfect at the time, he followed her less than two years later, passing in his sleep.  His colleagues said his heart just gave out.  It was Christmas Eve when he went, and the service was held on the twenty-seventh.  It snowed at his funeral; the dirt was cold as they threw it over his coffin.  I cried, but it was a hollow feeling. Since my mother had died, I'd seen it coming in my father.  His eyes had been empty without her.

I sold my father's stocks and bonds, our house, and our minivan, and I sent the money with my brother to stay with family out in the country a few states away.  I know they cared for him more lovingly than I could have; I still get Christmas cards with their smiling photos in them, and my brother calls me from time to time.  He loves the country, and I have no guilt over sending him away.

He certainly couldn't have stayed with me.  I found myself avoiding phone-calls from DHS, and in the end it seemed like sheer luck was all that kept me out of an orphanage: Shannon happened to stop by.

"Are you sure you'll be alright?" she asked me.  We sat in my kitchen, drinking hot tea in the dark; the house had been sold effective of the first of the year, and boxes lay scattered around the house, some empty, most full.  I'd had to beg to keep the water running; they'd already shut off the electricity. "You don't look so good," she said.

That was Shannon's way of saying she was worried about me, though literally she was right.  My father's memory was a good one, and his ghost had left me in peace. Still, I was missing a lot of sleep.

"I'll be fine," I said.  "I just wish I knew what to do.  I don't know… The thought of moving away to some foster home somewhere…" I shook my head helplessly.

"Scares you," Shannon finished for me.  From anyone else, it would have been an insult.  I just nodded, feeling tired.   She took a long drink of her tea and then sat back in her chair. Her gray eyes glinted at me through the dim light filtering off the melting snow outside the kitchen windows.  I shivered; I'd been keeping a fire going in the fireplace, and while it kept a few rooms above freezing, it was hardly comfortable.  I sighed. It wouldn't be long before somebody from the state showed up to take me away.  And maybe that was for the best, after all…

"You don't have to go," she said quietly.

"What do you mean?" I asked, feeling angry.  "They're dead, Shannon.  They're dead, and Austin is gone to stay with the family, and I'm alone.  I've called my relatives; none of them will take me in.  None of them."  I bowed my head, frustrated and trying to fight back tears for the thousandth time since the funeral. It was true: none of the few family relations I could get in contact with would take me.

"My best bet was my uncle, out in New York, but I can't get in touch with him. Nobody knows where he is, or how to find him.  He doesn't even know about my dad. And nobody else wants me," I repeated again.

"I know, Sarah," Shannon said.  "But you can become your own guardian; you turned sixteen earlier this month, and the state will recognize that."  She watched me, weighing every little motion I made.  "You'd have to get a job, of course, and show you had somewhere to stay…"

"I don't have either of those," I said, shaking my head.

"Not yet."  Shannon raised an eyebrow.  "But that doesn't mean it's impossible. How hard are you willing to try?"

*          *          *

I got a job at the paper the next day, whoring out my love for the English langue as a copy editor and general errand-girl.  I only worked part-time and what hours I did put in didn't pay a lot, but as it turned out, I didn't need much money: Shannon took me in.

She lived on the south side of town, in a small but comfortable two-level apartment.  Apparently she owned it, because I never once in all my days there saw her pay rent.  "It's no Baker Street," she said as we arrived at her doorstep, arms full of boxes, "but then, this isn't exactly London, now is it?"

The second floor held a small living room full of bookshelves and comfortable, worn chairs, with a computer set up in the corner almost as an afterthought.  A pair of windows looked down into the street.  Two of the doors leading off that room led to bedrooms – one Shannon's, and one now mine, connected by a clean, if small, bathroom. The third led to the stairs.

The first floor was made up of a kitchen and a smaller apartment that Shannon told me would have been meant for servants when this part of the city was first built a hundred years ago.  This was occupied by Dr. Everett Harding and his wife. Everett, a scattered, jovial man, taught philosophy at the university downtown, and his wife, known to me simply as Mrs. Harding, kept house and cooked for us in place of the couple's paying rent.

It wasn't luxurious, but to me, everything about it felt like home.

I went back to school when Christmas break ended. Life with Shannon wasn't easy. She was a terrible insomniac and spent more nights than I care to remember plucking at her violin; she lived a life even more chaotically eccentric than I ever could have expected; she had a habit of taking off at odd hours and not showing again for days at a time.  Once, she disappeared for two weeks; I was worried sick when she reappeared again, acting as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. This went on more and more frequently as time went on, and she refused to answer any of my questions about it.  Eventually I just dropped it, letting her come and go and trying to stay out of her way, as frustrating as it was at times. But all in all, I was grateful to have a place to stay.  We made decent roommates that first semester I stayed with her, and I looked forward to another year of the same strange, if fulfilling, situation.

I had no idea how much more Shannon really had in mind.