As hard as this is to say I made a mistake; I was wrong. I have always said that love is a chemical defect found in the losing side, yet allowed my heart to overrule my head and was confident that John and I could stay together and have a family. Logically I knew that John would die before me but I never imagined I'd have to die before him.
When John became pregnant we stopped hiding our love, we would often visit crime scenes hand in hand and, as Greg would often tell us, we had a habit of staring deeply into each other's eyes at inappropriate moments- such as over a corpse. This habit was mainly due to my lack of experience in expressing emotion. I was a fool, I was so focused on John I didn't notice Moriarty watching us until he visited me.
John was 6 months pregnant at the time and was clearly showing; we could hardly hide her sexuality anymore but we decided it didn't matter; she was stronger and braver than most men anyway. She was visiting an old army friend who knew about her when Moriarty visited. We had an interesting conversation where much was made clear to each other. I discovered that I was wrong about Moriarty's intensions. Moriarty was one of the few creatures alive who knew how to 'kill' me; to burn a whole one of my feathers and clip my soul. This is harder than it sounds; when I clipped my feathers I spread tiny bits of them over the entire earth and only have two whole feathers left (without at least one whole feather I would become powerless as they contain the last of my grace) and those feathers are separate and closely guarded, one by me and one by a powerful human descendant who will remain nameless. I wrongly assumed Moriarty would threaten and steal my feather and burn it to send me into hell and madness, and that I could stop and destroy him before he had the chance. As I'm sure most of you are aware this wasn't what happened; the Reichenbach fall happened.
Moriarty told me that he would destroy me in his own time, that first he owed me a fall. After he left I began noticing 'IOU' painted in all the places where I had had major cases. There were4 variations of this graffiti, each standing for a different person. There was one surrounded by a pair of black wings losing two feathers- that was me. The second showed England falling- I'd always insisted that is Mrs Hudson left Baker Street England would fall. The third had a pair of handcuffs and a revolver- Lestrade. The forth was more subtle; Moriarty was eating an apple while he was at my appartment and had carved IOU into it. He had also used his powers to insert a Brazilian wandering spider inside the apple so that when you held it up to sunlight you could see it moving around inside, like the apple was pregnant. There is a saying that 'an apple a day keeps the Doctor away'- this fall was for John, and would possibly destroy our child. It was clear to me at this point that I was going to have to jump, to make it look like I killed myself. If I didn't Moriarty would kill everyone close to me, my only 3 friends in the world, and would make sure to kill them in such a way that John's and my child would blame me and be filled with hate and poison.
I couldn't tell John before I fell, she would try to stop me and get killed, so I sent her away, I think she was suspicious at the time but she didn't say anything about it, and I went to meet Moriarty with my feather.
here...