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William's body heals faster than his mind. The gaps in his memory are filled in bit by bit, detail by detail, excruciatingly slowly in comparison to his wounds. Sherlock helps him reconstruct the story, but William complicates the matter as it becomes increasingly obvious that not only are there events that he can't remember, but too much that he doesn't want to remember.
He has a tendency to fill gaps with plausible, but confabulated, memories that he believes are true. Sherlock supposes that it must be something akin to filling the blind spot. At times, William confabulates even when he does have a reasonable memory of what happened, and it's then, most of all, that Sherlock realizes that William's mind is never going to allow him to have access to an intelligible, unbroken, and consistent case history.
William doesn't remember anything from before the first fire.
Most of what he remembers, he only does after Sherlock reminds him. And now that William wants to shoulder his burden and atone for the sins that he does remember, Sherlock wonders what benefit there would be in making that burden heavier. Whether it's kinder to let him believe a story. That the childhood of three brothers ended with a terrible accident. Not the truth, but close enough to it that William, who wants to believe the story, can accept it as truth.
Sometimes, William tries to remember his mother.
Despite all his efforts, he says to Sherlock, he can never picture her face. "I see her, as if in my peripheral vision, moving through the room, but I cannot remember her features, or the colour of her hair, or her smile, even though I suppose that she must have smiled at me often. I have no memory of her voice, or her touch. And yet her life still exists, buried somewhere in my mind, and I don't want to abandon her there."
William is, he says, all the more unhappy for it, because there are other recollections that are so vivid. "Do I not remember because the loss is too painful? Or is it only a little boy, a second son, who never had enough time with his mother and father to forge more permanent memories?" He closes the topic with resignation.
Finally, they return to England.
Standing at the window one day with Albert, William asks, "Do you still miss our parents?" and Albert turns his head slightly, startled, and meets Sherlock's gaze over William's shoulder. He sees it when Sherlock's brows go down, hard, and when Sherlock mouths the word no. Sherlock isn't going to watch William's mind be torn to pieces all over again because of a need on Albert's part to purge himself.
"We don't look very much alike, do we?" William says, half-absently. "Louis and I, yes, certainly, but you -" and the ghost of a frown crosses his face, as though a door might have suddenly appeared in his mind. A door still locked tight, but one that he previously hasn't even known exists.
Albert's eyes shift towards Sherlock one more time, and in that brief moment, Sherlock watches Albert Moriarty shoulder his own burden, the burden that will be his alone now, and the burden that he'll carry for the rest of his life, just like William and Louis carry theirs. He once tried to bury it in the ashes of his family home, but his heart will always be charred by it, and every day when he wakes up and smells the air, he'll breathe it into his lungs. The protection of the most fragile part of William is going to be shared from now on.
Albert clears his throat.
"I look like Father," he answers. "You and Louis look like Mother. It was a joke among our family... that no-one else ever believed that all three of us were brothers. But we are brothers, Will. You can always, always be sure of that," and Sherlock sees, in his face, a degree of fidelity that he thinks might surpass even his own.
William smiles, that softest, purest, and truest smile of his, and takes Albert's hand.
So it makes sense to the two other men, as they stand in silent agreement and contemplate the lives that they want to preserve, to keep this secret between them. There will be no mention of it again in front of William, from either of them, or from Louis. What William doesn't know, can't hurt him.
Not today, at least. The future remains to be seen.