Chapter Text
The wind howls as it tears through the blown-out windows. It’s a miracle that anything survived the blast, really. She picks her way through the rubble that was once 221B Baker Street. The policemen stare at her as she comes to a stop in front of the great Sherlock Holmes. “I have a case,” she says, her voice wavering with ambivalence and despondency. Sherlock slowly glances up from the charred moose that once hung above the window, into the girl’s desolate, sea-green eyes. There’s a lifetime of torment, a lifetime of sorrow there, he notices belatedly.
“Molly.” The name comes out on just a breath, but somehow, she hears it. The tears brim as he embraces her, and she melts into his arms. “How can you do this to me?” she murmurs, her own tears tumbling down her cheeks, like waterfalls off of a precipice. “How am I supposed to stay when all I have isn’t even enough for you? I need someone who will stay with me, someone who won’t run off into danger with no thought of those who- who love him. Are you able to answer that question? Are you?” she asks, her thin shoulders quivering. Sherlock exhales slightly, trying to present an indifferent facade. “No, I’m not. It’s the one question that I’ve been asking myself from the start,” he replies. He lets go of her, attempting to keep a hold on his emotions. But how can he, when she’s leaving him, perhaps for good? How can he, when his whole life is going heaven-knows-where, possibly never to be seen again? He trembles with the realization that she might not come back, that she might hate him so much that she wouldn’t want to ever be reminded of the heartbreak that she suffered for him.
Molly brushes his dark, curly hair out of his bell pepper green eyes, and he clenches his fist. Her hand trembles as she traces the scar on his cheekbone that his encounter with Irene Adler left. His eyes darken and shine with unshed tears and he turns away so she doesn’t see him cry. Especially now, after Euros, he’s too prideful to let anyone see weakness in him. After Mary’s goodbye speech is the last time anyone ever saw him shed a tear. He goes back to that day:
John couldn’t comprehend what was going on. Sherlock, of course knew what it was at once. It was the same handwriting that was on the other CD. John put it in and pressed ‘play’. Mary’s voice issued over the speakers, sounding remorseful and yet somehow full of hope. “I know you two. And if I'm gone, I know what you can become, because I know who you really are. A junkie who solves crimes to get high, and the doctor who never came home from the war. Well you listen to me, who you really are doesn't matter. It's all about the legend. The stories, the adventures. There is a last refuge for the desperate, the unloved, the persecuted. There is a final court of appeal for everyone. When life gets too strange, too impossible, too frightening, there is always one last hope. When all else fails, there are two men sitting, arguing in a scruffy flat, like they've always been there, and they always will. The best and wisest men I have ever known. My Baker Street Boys, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.” John had sat down, tears streaming down his cheeks. Sherlock had concealed all his feelings but one tear, one crystalline confession, slowly coursing down his cheek. John hadn’t understood. How could he? John thought him an unfeeling machine. He just didn’t understand. No one understood him except for the person who was leaving him, the person that he might not ever see again: Molly.