Epilogue

Though he had no Mind Palace of his own, those conversations, those moments with Mary had come back to John with surprising crystal clarity. He felt her presence at his shoulder the whole time he was typing, revising and re-typing his speech.

Mary had been right, she'd been bloody right.

He would be up in a minute, and he gently tapped the cue cards on his knee. He was in the middle of the strangest wedding he would ever have the privilege of attending, and with the strangest gathering. On the table slightly to his left were Mr and Mrs Holmes, along with Mycroft and Lady Smallwood (there was another marriage he hadn't seen coming). Mrs Holmes had been dabbing at her eyes all day, and on a number of occasions had to be physically prised away from her younger son, such was her overwhelming happiness. Mycroft wore a look of faint nausea disinterest, but John knew how he really felt.

Next to them were Greg Lestrade and his wife (divorce on hold), Mrs Hudson and her latest beau, and his own beautiful daughter. Rosie was two years old and looked so much like her mother that it sometimes hurt John to look at her. But he took strength from that, too, and had been giving her little, reassuring waves while she enjoyed playing games and looking at picture books with the Lestrades and Mrs Hudson.

The only other faces John knew belonged to Mike Stamford and his wife, and a handful of colleagues from Bart's, friends of Molly's. But that didn't mean the room wasn't full. Initially, Wanda Holmes had been devastated by the short guest list, barely twenty people, including the bride and groom. John had overheard the conversations in Sherlock's living room, Mrs Holmes' pleas to be allowed to invite sundry cousins, neighbours, old family friends. Not a proper celebration otherwise, she had said. Sherlock's response to this, of course, had been typical Sherlock…

Although John hadn't counted, there had to be close to a hundred members of Sherlock's homeless network in the room – men, women, young, old, gleaned from all over the city. These were the people who were important to Sherlock, to whom he felt indebted - and Molly was willing to indulge him because, John knew, without them the Reichenbach Fall could have ended very differently.

And beside John, to his right, were his two friends. He still didn't know exactly what had passed between Sherlock and Molly after the events at Sherrinford, what words had been exchanged, what confessions made, but here they were. Slightly more than a year, so you were a bit off there, Mary.

Molly looked beautiful and happy, so happy. She and Sherlock held hands under the table, while her other hand gently toyed with the napkin which, like half of the others, had been expertly folded to resemble a deerstalker hat. The other half were folded into cats.

There was something that Mary hadn't foreseen, though, something John knew she would have been delighted by: Dr Molly Hooper-Holmes was nearly eight months' pregnant. She and Sherlock certainly hadn't hung around on that score – if it had been an accident, neither were saying, but John knew that his friend was already utterly smitten with his unborn child. Though John had joked that Best Man duties did not extend to delivering the couple's child during the wedding breakfast.

"Pray silence for the best man!"

Guests skittered back to their seats, settled down, sat obediently while their glasses were being refilled. As John got to his feet, he could see out of the corner of his eye Molly and Sherlock exchanging a kiss, something – if you'd asked him a year ago – he'd have told you would be weird to see, but he realised that it never did, it never had. Mary was right – they worked, they met in the middle. Now they turned to look at him, expectantly, Molly's deep brown eyes smiling at him, Sherlock giving the slightest of winks.

John cleared his throat.

"As everybody here knows," he began. "I have made a career out of being proven wrong."

A laugh rippled across the room.

"But this time, it wasn't by the smart-arse seated to my right," he continued. "It was by the wisest, sharpest human being I have ever had the privilege of knowing…"

THE END