Readers, we have come to the end of our journey together (and just in time, too, what with Series 2 about to tear us all to pieces) and it has been a most rewarding and heartfelt one for me, at least. In case you didn't notice, this story has just achieved novel-length (45,000+ words), and that blows my mind like you wouldn't believe.

There will be an epilogue, but I am not yet sure whether I will post it as a final chapter here or as a separate story, so we shall see.

To all you lurkers who have been reading from the shadows, I would very much like to hear what you think, be it positive or negative, so if you feel so inclined, I would be honored to see a review from you.

Enjoy, and thank you all so much!

"So do you… think he knew?"

Sherlock paused mid-swig, the glass of water chill against his lip and the gritty Oxycodone tablet pressed to the roof of his mouth. He glanced at John, but John was busy trying not to make eye contact. Pensively, Sherlock downed the pill and handed the glass back to the good doctor, who took it, though hesitantly.

"He knows a lot of things," Sherlock replied, perching himself on the corner of his desk, "to which of those are you referring?"

"Well, the whole case started as a rape investigation." He elaborated, leaning on the footboard of Sherlock's bed and still venturing to look directly at his flatmate in only brief, fleeting glances. "Do you think that Moriarty maybe suggested that...specific diversion? Did he know about what happened to you all those years ago and expect it to throw you off?"

Sherlock smiled patronizingly and shook his head. "Just a coincidence."

"I seem to recall you telling me once that there are very few true coincidences," John pressed.

"I know what it seems like," Sherlock conceded, "a man as intelligent and as wily and as well-connected as Jim Moriarty would make it his business to know absolutely everything he could about his adversary, certainly. And if past encounters are any indication, he would take any opportunity to use that information against me, but trust me when I tell you that the only people who know about that are in this room right now, and at least one of them certainly hasn't been spreading it around."

"I haven't told anyone," John agreed with resolute devotion, then his brow furrowed, "but there is at least one other person who knows," he reasoned, "this guy, Vincent, maybe he got...braggy, or maybe he was bribed - "

"As I said," Sherlock reiterated, looking down at John with emphatic finality, "the only people who have ever known are in this room. Right now."

Had it been possible, John's expression would have grown even more perplexed, but his eyebrows could only knit so close. "But - " It occurred to him then to follow Sherlock's line of sight, and where Sherlock was looking at that very moment was at the greyish, chalk-dry skull that – though emptied of its previous contents - still rested quietly on the bedside table.

John felt suddenly as if the bottom had dropped out of his stomach. He snapped to attention and took a step back that sent him bumping onto the chest of drawers, as though physically distancing himself from the thing would somehow lessen the gravity of its implication. "Christ..." he breathed, disbelieving, "you didn't...you actually killed him? I mean, I can't say I blame you, but - "

"Oh don't be so dramatic," Sherlock scoffed, fluffing his hair nonchalantly, "no, it was much more fitting than that." He nodded toward the skull as if saluting an old friend. "He killed himself. Inadvertently, of course, heroin overdose, the year after I went back to school. The friends who had been with him were too afraid to go to the police, they just cleared off, let him die there in that empty flat. He didn't have any family to speak of, at least, none that cared enough to check in on him. It was two weeks before anyone found the body, an even then it was only because of the smell. The police couldn't locate any living relatives, so they asked the landlord if he'd had any close friends who they could sign the remains over to. He'd had plenty of flatmates, they came and went practically every month, but 'Sherlock' is a memorable enough and an uncommon enough name that I was the first person they tracked down."

"So you just kept his corpse?"

"Let me finish!" He snapped, rolling his eyes slightly, "No, I had it donated to science, specifically, to the anatomy and physiology lab at Sidney Sussex College. Paid a facility in Germany to strip him down to a skeleton and put it on an articulated frame so it could be used as a model. The year I left, the skull of that skeleton went mysteriously missing. The rest of him is still there, still used, and the students still do call him Vincent, though they assume it's just a nickname, but I figured I deserved a little memento of our time together. He does legally belong to me, after all."

"And you kept drugs in there because of..."

"Irony."

"Right..." he shook his head, nearly smiling. "My god, Sherlock, you are the most uncanny...thing."

Sherlock just shrugged.

"And...that's how you cope? By making your assailant's remains your own personal joke?"

"I put silly hats on it sometimes," he murmured, leaning over to lift it from the table and hold it aloft, very much like Hamlet.

John pursed his lips. "Mycroft told me –"

"Never listen to Mycroft."

"Mycroft told me," John continued determinedly, "that the night you moved in with him, the night you left Vincent, that you overdosed. On cocaine. He said you very nearly died."

"Oh, I didn't very nearly anything." He lowered his arm and tossed the skull casually in his hand, his tone dismissive. "Eight minutes, didn't he mention? Stone dead. Luckily I was too stubborn to stay that way."

"Sherlock," John continued, his tone softening slightly with every word, "I'm not sure what you're trying to prove with this...flippancy of yours, and, well, I can't pretend to know how you were feeling that night, what was going through your head, but just tell me, just so I know...was it really an accident? I mean, as smart as you are, it seems to me you would have...at least known how much you could tolerate."

Sherlock's tongue touched his lips and he did not respond immediately. Careful of his injured side, he pushed off the desk, set the skull back on the table, and lay down heavily on his bed, eyes distant as he considered his response carefully.

"It wasn't an accident," he admitted, his tone measured, "but I wasn't trying to kill myself, either."

"Then what in god's name were you trying to do?"

Sherlock closed his eyes and let out his next breath meditatively. "Reboot."

John's face screwed up distastefully. "What do you mean, reboot?"

"I mean start over," he put his hands to his forehead, "wipe the hard drive, delete everything. Cocaine..." he paused, finding himself in a rare predicament indeed, struggling to articulate his thoughts, "it simplifies things, and makes them more complex all at the same time. It's discordant, but it gives me the capacity to see order in discord, and it makes it easy for me to just erase things, delete unnecessary information. When I come back down, everything is easier to process, because all that noise is gone. I theorized that with enough cocaine, I could...reset all systems completely. Maybe not erase all the memories, because some contained useful information, but separate them from emotion, store them like files, force them to make sense."

"And it didn't work."

"In some sense, it did. Death has an extraordinary effect on the brain," Sherlock mused, his eyes having drifted open to gaze toward the ceiling. "I suffered retrograde amnesia, months' worth, but of the opposite sort that I had intended. I was left with a cacophony of emotion and no memories to associate them with. I remembered Vincent, but had no idea what he'd done to make my hands shake and my heart pond and my stomach turn whenever I thought of him. That confusion scared me far more than the feeling itself, the feeling that I was missing something hugely important but couldn't retrieve it."

John was now leaning against the chest of drawers, arms crossed, his gaze still fixed on Sherlock, but slightly vacant nonetheless. "When did you finally sort it all out?"

Sherlock's eyes flicked from their comfortable fix on the ceiling to meet John's, and he smiled wryly. "A week ago."

John decided that he must learn to resign himself to the fact that Sherlock would never, ever stop surprising him, but he couldn't stop the very blunt "You're not serious?" that tumbled from his mouth.

"Quite serious. I retained certain associations, a few split-second flashes of recollection, but absolutely nothing I could put together in any comprehensible way."

"So you really didn't properly remember until...until you overdosed again?"

"Hardly surprising," Sherlock sighed, "brain trauma does tend to work that way, experience will recall associated memories, it happens often with smells, sounds, things like that."

"I know, I've heard of it happening, but..." he trailed off. "So refusing to take rape cases..."

"I told you. My reasons – my conscious reasons, at least – were exactly as I said."

"You mentioned you'd had sex before. So you weren't referring to Vincent?"

"No."

John decided that the line of questioning warranted no further intrusion. The burn on his stomach still tingling unpleasantly, he took a few steps nearer and sat heavily on the foot of Sherlock's bed. He ran his fingers through his hair with a sigh and then lay back, his heels just barely short of the floor. "So were you trying to delete me, then?"

"Hmm?"

"That night, with the morphine, is that what you were doing? I was angry with you, I know, and it wasn't the case you were thinking about, so don't feed me that bollocks. Morphine is a downer, not an upper, it wouldn't have helped your 'cognitive abilities,' so what was it?"

Sherlock sighed. "I was just...trying to turn off. Too many emotions, too much I couldn't sort out. I wanted a respite." He tilted his head up to look at John more directly. "And that was an accident. I knew I was taking a high dose, but it had been a while, and I was impatient."

John grumbled and shook his aching head disapprovingly against the duvet.

"I don't think I could delete you if I tried, anyway."

John half-smiled. "Well, that's...comforting."

"My associative memory would respond every time I heard the words 'get milk' in a sentence, it would be a disaster."

He was actually smiling now. "Yes, speaking of which –"

"House arrest, John."

John snorted with indignant laughter. "If this were literally any other situation, you would completely disregard that, yet you have the audacity to use it as an excuse not to do the shopping?"

"Um...yes."

"And you know that we're not legally under house arrest, right? We haven't officially been charged with anything, not yet anyway; Lestrade is just trying to keep a leash on us so we don't get into any more trouble."

"I know."

John sighed in exasperation. "So, what are we going to do with no non-perishable food and no means of entertaining ourselves for the next...indeterminate amount of time?"

"I'm sure I'll think of something."

"Just promise me that you won't blow anything up."

"I will not," he paused, choosing his words carefully, "intentionally blow anything up."

"That means nothing."

"I know, I'm covering myself."

"You never change."

"I never intend to."

John nudged Sherlock's foot rather roughly away with his shoulder. It had been drifting awkwardly close to his ear for the last several minutes.

"I wouldn't have it any other way," he admitted grudgingly, with a long-suffering sigh.

"I know." His mouth twitched into a smile as he tilted his head down to gaze fondly at the army doctor laid across the foot of his bed. "Nor would I."