Chapter 67 – What Life? I've Been Away

Rose let her tears flow freely as Billy hugged her back. She would miss her friend terribly. The ache in her heart grew as she clung to his neck.

Billy gently patted her back and said, "Promise you won't be angry."

Rose eased out of their embrace. They weren't the words of farewell she was expecting. She wiped her eyes and sniffed.

"What?"

"Look, Rosie, I know you said you didn't want me to tell 'im you're leavin', but Shezza's upstairs if you wanna say goodbye."

Rose's stomach dropped several inches. He was here in east London? Right now, just when she happened to have called round to see Billy?

Rose had determinedly put Sherlock Holmes out of her mind—although impossibly not out of her heart—months ago. She was coming to terms with the fact that she'd never see him again, but now on this day, her last day in London, she had the opportunity one final time.

"Billy," she said, exasperatedly.

"'e doesn't know you're 'ere neither. I got 'im 'ere under false pretences."

"You asked him here?"

"'e's just upstairs."

At first, Rose was stunned by Billy's craftiness. That was so unlike him. But then again, in the last couple of months, she had the distinct impression that Bill Wiggins was firmly on team Sherlock. Was he learning how to manipulate people, too?

She looked toward the stairwell and her mind traversed all of the painful memories she'd had of visiting Sherlock in the drug den when he was going through whatever he was doing for his case. Before he'd been shot.

"Is he… high?"

"Ah…" Billy began. Then he shrugged lightly. "Nope."

Rose planted her hands on her hips and glared at Billy.

"Is he, or isn't he?"

"'e may've 'ad summin' yesterday, but we've been busy workin' today. 'e's jus' 'avin' a nap."

Rose's insides churned at the prospect at what she may find upstairs. There were no sounds of construction emanating from above, so evidently he wasn't in any kind of manic state.

"I don't want to see him if he's..."

"e's not, Rosie. I promise."

"What's he on these days?"

Billy feigned another shrug. "Ah… y'know."

"No, I don't know."

"Jus'…"

"Don't bother explaining. It's none of my concern anymore." But her face softened as she regarded her friend who looked like he was about to be chastised. "Billy," she said, reaching for his hand. "I came here to say goodbye to you. Let's not spoil it."

"C'mon, Rosie. Jus' a minute upstairs. Say goodbye to the bloke. You'll break 'is heart otherwise."

Rose let Billy's hand go and frowned up at him. "I broke up with him months ago… how can I…"

Billy shuffled his feet and rubbed at the back of his neck. Rose knew those gestures.

"Billy."

"Well… 'e doesn't really think you broke up with 'im."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's like this, innit? 'e's been working on this case for you…"

"Don't give me that. How can he not know? He was in the restaurant when I walked out on him. He wasn't that out of it."

"'e jus' thought you were angry."

Rose folded her arms in front of her and said, "I was angry."

"But you're always doin' that—walkin' out on 'im."

"I gave him an ultimatum."

"I told 'im you'd come round to 'is way of thinking."

Rose couldn't believe the gall of Billy to speak on her behalf and she started to chastise him. But if Sherlock thought Rose was merely angry with him, why didn't he insist on seeing her like he did once before?

When she posed this question to Billy, he replied, "Coz 'e thinks 'e 'as t'solve the case first."

"But it's been months."

"'e 'asn't done a lot. 'e's been in and outta rehab since then. I told y' at the time."

Billy had been keeping Rose posted on all things related to Sherlock—evading his brother, escaping from a rehabilitation facility, ending up back in hospital—and Rose had, rather bluntly, told her friend on several occasions that she wasn't interested in knowing the finer details of Sherlock Holmes's exploits. Billy gave her the excuse that she did keep asking him whether he himself was busy or not and he had truthfully told her all the tasks he had been helping Shezza with, which included, but was not limited to, solving minor cases and helping Sherlock escape to freedom.

"I'm 'is protégé," he had told Rose on more than one occasion.

"Look, I'm sorry, Billy. But I'm not going up. I came around to say goodbye to you since you couldn't come to my farewell dinner."

Rose stepped forward and pulled a reluctant Billy into a hug once more.

"Goodbye, Billy. Take care of yourself."

"Aw, c'mon, Rosie. 'e'll be 'artbroken and I'll be left t' pick up the pieces."

"No, I'm sorry," she said, withdrawing.

Rose started making tracks for the entrance, her heels echoing throughout the ground floor with every step.

"An' 'e's been working on a surprise for ya," Billy said from behind her. He hadn't moved from his spot in front of the opening to the kitchen.

Rose's shoulders slumped in disappointment, but she stopped and turned to face him.

"What surprise?" she asked, not knowing for sure if she really wanted to know, or if she could never dismiss Billy so easily.

"I can't tell ya."

"Well, I can't help what he's been doing and thinking. I really can't."

She turned for the front door again.

"It's a birthday present," Billy gushed, coming forward. Rose's heart sank. A birthday present! "So it's not really ready yet," Billy continued, "but you won't be 'ere, so it doesn't matter if you see it early. Please, Rosie. Jus' go up. If you care for 'im at all."

Rose slowly shook her head. She'd never known Billy to use emotional blackmail to get what he wanted out of anybody. In fact, the man rarely asked anybody to do anything they didn't want to do. Sherlock had definitely been influencing him. Protégé, indeed.

Rose ran her gaze along the passageway toward the stairwell. He'd remembered her birthday. An enormous pressure built up behind Rose's eyes when she recalled watching the fireworks from the top of Big Ben to herald in the New Year—her birthday treat from Sherlock. Could she face him after all this time? It had been months.

She'd left the Italian restaurant that morning both fearful and heartbroken. Sherlock had clearly disregarded her wishes, opting to stick doggedly to his plans and meet with Magnussen. Her continual assertion—that being seen in public with the famous Sherlock Holmes may provoke some interested paparazzo into wondering who the Consulting Detective's new female companion was—had always been ignored or dismissed by Sherlock. The things they used to speculate in the press about Sherlock and John Watson's relationship status was both pathetic and outrageous. Rose hated the thought of anybody prying into her private life.

And what would become of her goal of one day entering the forensic psychology field if potential employers and clients knew of her past working as a prostitute? What would they think of her integrity? Would she be respected among her peers or would she become a laughing stock—a fantasy figure for the criminal element who she may one day be trying to rehabilitate? Would they be listening to her advice, or would they be imagining her naked in all kinds of positions?

Sherlock purposefully provoking Magnussen would have prompted the newspaper proprietor into prying into Sherlock's life for pressure points. If she had stayed with Sherlock, how long would it have taken for Magnussen's spies to see her with him? She would immediately be identified as the woman who had an 'affair' with John Garvie. Even if that was the only dirt CAM Global News had on her, her face plastered all over the papers may lead to other people coming forward saying they knew her when she worked in a brothel and a strip club. A forensic psychologist who was a former prostitute and stripper and dating the famous Consulting Detective? That would make a great morning's entertaining read on page three.

Why could Sherlock never see what a huge issue this was for her?

But it didn't matter anymore. After the events of the past couple of months, Rose was determined to put as much distance between herself and Sherlock Holmes as possible. And that meant leaving London.

She hated being around her mother during the festive season. The woman didn't handle stress very well and became quite tyrannical throughout the period. Rose didn't mind that she was leaving London for Scotland to live with her cousin, four doors down from her own mother, but she did choose to leave on Christmas Eve, thus avoiding the stress of the lead up to the family's festivities.

"Rosie," Billy prompted her.

Rose blinked back tears and had made up her mind. She could do this. She could end their relationship one more time if Sherlock hadn't received the message loud and clear on that last occasion. She had practically run out of the restaurant at the thought of Magnussen appearing in the doorway at any moment. Perhaps she did owe it to her ex-boyfriend to ensure he really knew he was an ex.

"Okay," she said quietly.

Squaring her shoulders and lifting her head, she strode purposefully toward the stairs where Billy was waiting for her.

"Is he in the hall or your room?" she asked, pausing on the second step.

"Ah… neither," Billy replied, looking up at Rose from the bottom step and smiling sheepishly. "'e's in the room two doors along from mine."

Rose gazed upwards.

"What room?"

There were no habitable rooms two doors up from Billy's. At least there never used to be. Those old tutorial rooms were little more than spaces that housed rotting floorboards that could give way if you trod on them. Not many of them even had doors, and the ones that did, the doors could barely swing on their hinges nor latch shut.

"That's the surprise," Billy said. "'e's been renovatin' a room for ya."

"What? Why?"

"For when your parents' 'ouse sells. 'e didn't want you to be 'omeless, an' you won't live with 'im o'course."

"The house has already sold," Rose told him. She'd been staying with Mel, her old friend from work these last two weeks.

"'e didn' know that, Rosie. It's a surprise. It's not finished yet because 'e's not always… able to do it when 'e's 'ere."

Manic one minute, out of it the next, Rose thought, her heart growing heavy the closer she physically came to seeing Sherlock again. She'd tried so hard not to care about him, and it had become easier once she had the distraction of uni.

The lectures and tutorials, late night group Skype sessions and socialising in the uni pub and coffee shops were part of a new life that Rose loved and thrived in. Her promotion to head office at work due to Gus's mysterious and sudden termination gave her an increase in earnings she hadn't expected, even though she was only working part-time now. She still managed to do her counselling work with the ASXX, less frequently though, because of the enormous workload that came with studying for her Masters in Forensic Psychology.

At home she didn't miss Sherlock's physical presence. He'd never been to her parents' house, so there was no space that he had once occupied that tormented her in his absence. She couldn't imagine him exhausted due to inactivity attempting to stretch out on the tiny two-seater in the living area. Forget about them both snuggling in front of the telly. And where would he go for a smoke? Certainly not in the common area through the back double doors, where neighbours' kids kicked their soccer balls and other smokers and drinkers often congregated on a Friday night after work, weather permitting. Rose slept on a single bed in the guest room (she thought it odd to sleep in her parents' bed), so there was no empty space beside her where Sherlock Holmes ought to have slept.

Living this relatively normal life put a new perspective on the previous life she had once shared with Sherlock since his return to London in November last year. Her time with him began to feel surreal, dream-like—the fits of lethargy, the manic bursts of energy and streams of deductions, the midnight sojourns through the city, the condom testing and goodbye rituals, making love in the shower, the list of negatives against sex in the bath, smoking on the balcony, toking underneath a blanket, wedding preparations… all of it. An hallucinogenic dream.

This was her life now. This was her reality. It felt comfortable, like an old coat, and there were no stresses beyond essay deadlines and London transport issues affecting her commute between her workplaces, home and uni.

But then came the tiny tears in the fabric of her peaceful existence. It began with a seemingly innocuous, almost forgettable, news story. A forty-something female MP was left shame-faced and embarrassed when photographs circulated of her performing a private strip-tease for a former boyfriend's twenty-first birthday celebrations when she herself had been twenty. The story only ran for a week, but the photos had leaked onto the internet. Rose witnessed the media frenzy second-hand, an uncomfortable churning in her gut the entire time.

A month or so later came the news items that hit closer to home. Two more MPs were exposed, a week apart, for their own seedy indiscretions. These members were sitting on the Media and Communications Committee—the same committee Sherlock had ensured John Garvie resign from and the one that had been investigating Charles Augustus Magnussen.

One member had embezzled funds from a charity he chaired. His family were hounded by the press and questioned over how they had financed their last family holiday, until it was also exposed that the MP had once joined a stag group for a weekend abroad to visit brothels in Amsterdam.

The second MP was taken through the wringer for having a string of affairs with different staff members, both male and female, in the early years of his career and while he was still married to his first wife.

Rose followed one of his ex-lover's interactions with the press in particular. She was in her mid-twenties, and now a junior clerk in a tiny barristers' chamber in Shoe Lane. Rose saw the toll the exposure had taken on the woman, and she felt sick about it. The story came to its dramatic conclusion when the young clerk attempted to end her life through an overdose of sleeping pills, prompting a debate about the ethics of media organisations.

Rose's work and studies suffered for a month after that. But the last straw came during a group assignment and a discussion about which institutions (both law enforcing and rehabilitation) they could theoretically approach for their case studies. The talk turned to individual criminals, with the majority of females in the group deciding that they would love to have had a conversation with James Moriarty, had he still been alive. One of the males in her group, to whom Rose had already taken an instant dislike, said, "Bollocks. That fake detective is the real criminal." And then the conversation became rather heated as the majority of females were in support of Sherlock Holmes, while the two males took him to task over his fake death and subsequent resurrection.

Rose had unsuccessfully tried to steer the conversation back to the list of law enforcement agencies, but she finally gave up and made her excuses to leave the pub due to work commitments.

The idea that her two worlds could collide so easily gnawed at Rose for some time. Finally the seed of an idea—to join her family in Scotland, to enrol in a lesser course in Edinburgh—took root until she became quite driven to see her plans carried out.

Just this week's devastating news was reinforcement enough that Rose's decision to flee London was the right one. Lord Smallwood's letters had been made public. Sherlock had lost, Rose thought. She would never be safe here.

So several hours before her flight was due to leave, she found herself scrambling to say her final goodbyes to Billy… and now, Sherlock.

After giving Billy a weary smile, Rose continued up the two flights of stairs unaccompanied and strode the length of the corridor past Billy's door. She stopped outside the newest addition to the doss house: a brand new timber door, freshly painted in dark blue. She reached out and tentatively knocked. When she heard no sound from within, she tried the door handle. She was surprised to find that the door wasn't locked like Billy's usually was.

After quietly pushing the door open, Rose peered in.

The room was lit by a single lamp placed on a stool bedside the bed. Cardboard covered the window in place of a curtain, and Rose could see that one wall had been painted white up to a couple of feet below the cornice. The rest of the walls remained coated in various stages of old peeled paint.

Rose's insides twisted at the sight of Sherlock fast asleep, stretched out on the single bed that ran the length of one wall. Her skin began to prickle, but a warmth rippled through her that was quite unexpected, yet was a welcome familiarity.

Rose softly closed the door behind her and crossed the floor. A couple of floorboards creaked beneath her feet. As she neared the bed, she could hear Sherlock's faint snores. Her insides fluttered at the familiar sound, remembering his continual denials about it. He was far too clever for his body to do something so indelicate and ordinary as snoring, he'd always implied. It usually happened when he lay on his back, like he was doing now, when he was physically exhausted and had been sleep deprived in the days prior. She wondered what Sherlock had been up to with Billy to have him crash in the early evening still clad in his work shirt and trousers.

There were many occasions at Leinster Gardens where Rose had sat at her dining table studying and Sherlock lay on her sofa yelling at a crime thriller, only to fall asleep within the hour, snoring lightly. She would always sit by his side and run her hand through his curls before pressing a kiss to his lips until he stirred.

And just like that, a harsh realisation slammed itself into Rose's mind, overriding all other thoughts.

This here was her sharp reality. Sherlock Holmes: her relationship with him—everything they'd built together, the rituals, the trust, the emotional upheavals and triumphs. How could she have forgotten the enormous part he once played in her life?

Her entire body now flooded with both regret and despair.

That other life over the last few months, of irrelevant academic discussions, office work dilemmas, and persistent estate agents, had all been a dream.

"Sherlock," she said, her voice a light tremble. Was she calling him or suddenly realising who he was and what he meant to her?

Rose's chest grew tight, her heart a dull thud. A decision had to be made. Should she flee now without saying goodbye? She wouldn't be able to face him with the weight of her decision burdening her. Involuntarily she took a step backwards, but then she realised the snoring had stopped. She surmised that Sherlock's subconscious had heard her call and he was now climbing out of a deep sleep.

Tentatively, she took a step forward again. His huge presence in both her heart and this room drew her to him like a moth to a flame.

"Sherlock?" she said again, then mentally kicked herself. She hadn't actually decided what to do and here she was impulsively calling to him again. In her heart, she knew she wanted him to wake.

But had he stopped breathing? Was he awake now?

In the blink of an eye, Sherlock was suddenly upright. One hand immediately grabbed at the lamp and had raised it off the stool ready to strike, while one leg slipped off the bed to gain purchase.

Rose's eyes widened.

"No!" she called. "It's me."

Sherlock froze. He tilted his head and blinked as if to rid himself of the haze of sleep. He slowly lowered the lamp. His voice, when it came, was hoarse, yet filled with hope and a tiny sprinkling of disbelief.

"Rose?"

.


Author's Note:

There are only one or two chapters left in this series depending on how much I blather on. I hope this chapter wasn't too narrative-heavy. I felt it important to explain the motivation behind Rose's actions, and how she justifies her decision-making to herself. Also, the show included such a huge time jump that I thought I could write twenty more chapters about it if I wanted to live every minute of it. I decided against that for sanity reasons, both mine and yours.

Credit goes to BoAl, for the idea behind Gus getting fired. Thanks, Lexi!

Thanks for reading and hello to new subscribers. I would love to read your thoughts at this important place in the story, so close to the end. Review?