For a moment, Sherlock and Mary simply stared at each other. Tiny little Mary whose brown-blond braid had slipped to trail down the center of her back, staring at the still form of Sherlock Holmes, his left arm bound with an elastic strap, a needle hovering over his vein. She walked into the room with loud footsteps, and slapped Sherlock's hand hard sending the syringe flying across the room to bounce against the mirror before clattering to the floor to end up flush against the white, tiled wall. Sherlock looked after it, wondering if the needle had been bent. He turned back to see Mary staring angrily at him, her fists balled at her side.
"You worthless piece of shit! What in God's name do you think that you are doing?"
She reached forward and undid the strap around his arm so that the blood rushed in painfully. He pulled away from her then, rubbing his arm. Mary read the label on the bottle before glaring back at Sherlock. "Is that why you wanted to come back to my flat, to steal this from John's bag?"
"I wasn't stealing."
"What else do you call taking something without permission? This is morphene! You used to be an addict! You can't take this, especially without supervision. What kind of a thoughtless drongo must you be to do this to yourself?"
"I calculated the dosage. The other medicine wasn't working for the pain."
"And so you decided to self-medicate. And when this bottle was gone, what then? You'd have to get more. Where would you steal that from? Or would you just buy something illegally that would do the same thing? Heroin perhaps? Why would you do such at thing? I thought you loved John. Or was it that you want him to blame me for this? You want to make me look like a hateful person that would let the person he cares for die out of spite. Well I won't let you die like this, you selfish idiot. I won't let you kill yourself. I won't watch John stand over your grave a second time."
She bent down, picked up the syringe, and after bending the needle between her fingers, she pulled off the back of the syringe and poured the liquid down the drain turning the water on high to wash it all away. She picked up the pieces and the bottle of morphene and glared at Sherlock one more time before striding out of the room.
Sherlock stared into the mirror again, but his image quickly became obscured by the steam rising from the faucet, so he reached forward and turned it off. He straightened up then, rolling down his sleeves and buttoning his cuffs. Then he wiped the mirror with the back of his hand, checking his appearance before walking out into the room.
Mary was at the bedside table writing the name Dr. John Watson on an envelope. Then she slipped on her shoes and her coat and walked out of the room.
When she returned fifteen minutes later, Sherlock was sitting on the edge of the bed. The golden glow of the bedside lamp lit his face from below making it look red and flushed. He looked up at her as she slowly closed the door and walked over to sit on John's bed across from him. There was a moment of quiet when they simply sat saying nothing, their thoughts too full. Then she rose to her feet and went into the bathroom returning in a few minutes with a glass of water that she set on the table beside him. She placed two of the pain pills into his hand and he took them. Then he looked up into her face.
"Mary, have you been taking care of me simply because you don't want to appear hateful? Because you want John to think that you are nice. That seems a bit extreme. Any wife would be justified in turning away her husband's lover. You knew, didn't you, that we were lovers?"
"Of course I knew. He was always attracted to you. I knew it before we were married, I knew it before you came back. I expected it even. John's sleeping with you never worried me."
"Why not? I asked John to come back and live with me. Didn't that concern you? John isn't here now. There's no need to pretend. I know that you hate me."
"I don't hate you! I am, however, not always happy with your choices."
"A very politic answer. So correct. Very much what a nanny should say. So then Mary, please enlighten me. What particular things don't you like about me? Trust me, I've heard it all before."
"I don't like how selfish you are. You don't care about John's feelings."
"I am selfish, I can't deny that, but you're wrong about John. I do care for him, more than for anyone else in the world."
"Except yourself."
"That's not true. I died to the world in order to protect him."
"Yes, and that's another reason I'm angry. John may have forgiven you for jumping off of that building, but I never have."
"Forgiven me? I had to do it, or John would be killed."
"John almost died anyway."
"I don't understand."
"No, you don't do you? You don't understand grief, how it changes a person. Do you think that the John that I married is the same one that existed before you did that stupid stunt on the roof? He's not. He had part of his heart torn out by what you did. You could have stopped that at anytime. You could have told him that you were alive, but it wasn't worth the effort. It wasn't worth your time."
"There were assassins trailing him. I couldn't reveal myself. I watched over him as best I could."
"Yes, he told me about that. How you trailed behind him in disguises. If I could ever hate you it would be because of that. Because you watched him crying at your grave and turned away."
"I did it for him."
Mary laughed bitterly. "Is that why you tried to take those drugs today, for him? Stop deluding yourself. You've only ever cared about yourself."
"You don't understand. I know what I'm doing. I took the morphine for the pain. Calculated out the correct dosage. The other medicine wasn't working."
"You didn't give it a chance."
"Oh yes I did, and it took away my mind. Do you have any idea what THAT feels like? For someone like me who lives by his brain to have it taken away? I won't risk it again. I need my brain. The rest is transport."
"You are such a child? You think yourself so hard to understand, but you wear your pain on your sleeve like a badge. Do you think that you were the only boy that was bullied? The only one who was hated because he was too smart or too talented? People hurt your feelings, so you push them away. You try to make yourself an island, a robot. Do you think that you were the first to invent such a solution to pain? I assure you that you are not. Everyone feels pain. Everyone gets hurt, but we don't all pretend that we are two different creatures, a mind and a body, because it doesn't work that way.
"You cut John off from you, like one cuts off a diseased arm. You said that you did it to save him, but you were only saving yourself. In the meantime, he was wasting away without you."
"I was protecting him!"
"You were hurting him. You left him behind because he was a weakness for you. He would get in the way of your great campaign to take down Moriarty's organization and get back your fame."
"How can you be so deluded? I missed John horribly. I wanted to come back to him, every day."
"But you didn't come back."
"If I had, they would have killed him."
"Was that better than the pain he suffered without you? I was here. I held his hand when he cried over your empty grave, and when you came back, I almost wanted to kill you myself for what you did to him."
"I knew that he might not take me back. I knew that he might hate me, but I had to do what I did to protect him and the other people that I cared for. It was only logical..."
"Sometimes love isn't logical! Sometimes a person would rather die than spend another day alone!" Mary's high-pitched voice echoed off of the walls making the silence afterward seem even more profound, then tears streamed down her face like rivers. She covered her face with her hands and bent down so far that her hair rested on her knees.
Sherlock watched her curl into herself as she cried. He thought that he should do something to comfort her, but he didn't know what, so he simply sat and watched her cry until she rose and ran to the bathroom. Sherlock turned then, looking out of the window to see gray light spilling in through the thin white curtains. It was morning.