Title: Season 3 tag to "Sunset's Wake"
Author: Still Waters
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock. Just playing, with love and respect to those who brought these characters to life.
Summary: The news was proclaiming Sherlock Holmes's return from the dead. All she could think about, however, was John Watson.
Written: 5/25/14
Notes: As much as I loved writing this background character, I thought her tale was finished – until I found myself drawn to a local cemetery the day before Memorial Day, where she gave me this piece in one sitting. As always, I truly hope I did the characters justice. Thank you for reading. I cherish every response.
She was just entering the cemetery when her mobile chirped a text alert from her husband.
Sorry, love, but I thought you'd want to know straight away.
She frowned at the link attached to the text. Her husband knew she didn't read the news on remembrance days – the one day every three months when she went to the cemeteries to pay her respects to her mum, Emily, and Andrew's family. She only had room for so much emotion on a normal day; on remembrance days, she just couldn't handle the world's grief on top of her own.
A few tentative raindrops fell as the sun and clouds continued their morning-long dance for dominance.
The mobile chirped again: Phone if you need me.
Torn between concern and curiosity, she set her flowers at the base of a gnarled tree sheltering the wind-worn stones of a family gone nearly two hundred years and clicked on the link.
The breeze gasped with her; eyes misting despite the rain's abrupt cessation.
Blood-marred pavement juxtaposed against a photo of an old Scotland Yard press conference – one where an unmarred, familiar face stood at the center, cloaked in an imposing dark coat and a joke of a hat that had quickly become just as synonymous with his name. A photo of a military man's private grief at the loss of his other half made public, set alongside old headlines and photos of the pair at the height of their wholeness. The article linked to other similar articles, each headline vying for notoriety by stating the same news with varying degrees of sensationalistic wordplay.
But the core was still the same: Sherlock Holmes was alive.
A strangled chuckle, equal parts bitter anger and devastated memory, scraped her throat as roughly as the tree bark against her back as she slid to the ground. That she was reading the news of Mr. Holmes's resurrection in a cemetery was inappropriately, hysterically dissonant. That it occurred next to the stones of a family dead since the early 1800s, on a device that would have been akin to science fiction to them, even more so.
Sherlock Holmes was alive; an unexpected sunrise amidst the lingering shadows of a violent sunset two years past.
A crow swooped low and landed on a nearby marker with a click of nails on stone; a harsh caw and looming presence as dark as the raven of Poe's literary legacy. But as the sun surpassed the clouds, it tilted its head up to the warmth, blinking against the brightness as surely as she did at the glare off her mobile screen.
The sun was shining. Mr. Holmes was alive.
But all she saw, all she felt, was Dr. Watson in sunset's wake.
The red poppy wreaths fluttering in the breeze became the blood she stood in while holding John Watson at the height of his grief; the pink flowers laid at the grave to her right that same blood diluted as she washed it from her shoes after letting him go. The crow's strangled caw mirrored the raw vocalization of pain beyond words caught in Dr. Watson's throat as he saw his friend's lifeless eyes; the gray headstones the cold pavement under her feet, the gray sky above her. The ripple of hair against her neck echoed the tremors in Dr. Watson's corded muscles under her sure, grounding grip.
Until a pair of voices flipped the pages of chapters past back to that of the present. A young couple had entered the cemetery, heading for a section of old stones. The young woman stood a few paces back while the young man snapped to attention, saluted the headstone, then bowed his head in respectful remembrance. After several moments, he reached out for his companion, who stepped forward, took his hand, and crouched down alongside him to somberly place flowers at the site. But when they stood, the solemnity was replaced with overflowing joy, the woman twisting a ring on her finger while the man exuberantly shared the news with a generation he'd surely never met.
Her mum's ring scraped against gritty bark as she pushed on the tree and got to her feet. Laying one of the flowers from her bouquets at the foot of the family stone marking the loss of six children within four months of 1818, she began slowly walking toward Emily's grave.
Gravel crunched under her feet on the main paths. An elderly woman looked up from placing a stuffed animal at a fresh grave with a sad smile. A variety of birds chattered and clicked in a dozen languages, flitting from headstones to trees and pecking at rain-tipped grass. A robin triumphantly pulled a worm from the soil three stones down from Emily's, while the squirrel sitting on her friend's grave jumped in alarm at her approach and ran off.
Her stay at Emily's headstone was brief. A placement of fresh flowers – the red and orange of Andrew's sunsets tempered with the bright yellow of Emily's joyous personality. A touch of Emily's warm, silver watch to cold, gray stone. A prayer without specific chapter or verse. Even in the immediate wake of Emily's death, she'd known why Emily had done it; couldn't really blame her for making that decision while she cognitively could. But it was still suicide. It still hurt. Still bombarded her with anger, grief, depression, guilt, and a silent, screaming demand for answers - Why would you do this to me? What did I do to deserve this? – directed at intangible memories and an unyielding gravestone.
She wondered where Dr. Watson was in that maelstrom.
She detoured to an older section of graves on the way to her mum's, placing a small bouquet of forget-me-nots at the foot of a chipped stone so worn with time and weather that it was no longer legible – the face nearly smoothed to a full tabula rasa. She bowed her head in respect for a life lived; a sunset unknown but for those who bore the words engraved on their hearts. Two bees began an eager dance around the flowers as she walked on to her final stop.
"Hi, mum," she greeted the dark stone, ring hand brushing it with the same light touch inherent in the woman's lifelong treatment of the deceased. The colorful bouquet was carefully crafted – Andrew's sunsets, the light blue of her mum's soothing presence, the purple of her own favorite color, the white of the hand and face coverings that eased her childhood self into knowing death. Laying it at the foot of the stone, she sat down alongside the flowers and traced the engraving with a thoughtful finger; silent communion with a life well-loved and well-lived.
She tried to imagine what it would be like if her mum, or Emily, suddenly walked back into her life. How the past's grief, anger, and subsequent acceptance of loss would temper with the present's potential joy of a story's second chance to continue.
Her mobile chirped again – a manufactured syncopation to the surrounding birdsong. Her husband's text, a simple heart, lay bright against the background image of the sunset photo she'd taken on a cold beach two years ago.
Getting to her feet with a pop of cartilage and a joke to her mum about her daughter getting old, she said her goodbyes and began walking back to the cemetery gates.
Having paid her respects to the dead, her thoughts returned to the living, just as her mum had taught her. To those left behind.
To Dr. Watson.
The headlines proclaimed that Sherlock Holmes was alive. But sunrise didn't eliminate sunset, just as Lazarus rising from the tomb didn't negate the pain of that tomb's closing.
She wondered which hurt more – the renewed grief and anger or the reluctant, hopeful hint of joy.
But didn't envy John Watson for knowing.