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In his mirror, he saw not himself, but what would be. His whole life, planned before him with the scrape of a pen against parchment in the flickering, hazy candlelight of a London night and projected through the glass. Broadcasting in crystal-clear quality, it showed two figures racing through the cool night, amusingly high giggles complemented by the baritone, breathy laughter he knew was his own. Then there was smoke swirling from a pipe, a double-brimmed cap shading a sharp, ageing face, a gorgeous little cottage in Sussex Downs with bees and flowers, peace and Dr. John Watson.
Gritting his teeth, he shattered his future with the bloody knuckles of a desperate man searching for freedom.
The first flake falls the day after they wash Sherlock Holmes's blood from the cracks in the pavement. Glimmering in the weak light from the street lanterns, it settles to the concrete, hesitating on the brink of resilience and inexistence. Finally, it seems to make up its mind, and it stays put.
The rest of its companions join it, clustered together in the way of a first snow. Fragile. Brittle. Light, like one gust of breath could blow them apart into forgotten memories.
John's eyes bruise dark with the plague of an illness beyond cure. It is his particular soldier's brand of nightmare, the kind where both sides have won and lost and all he has to show that he survived is the renewed ache in his leg and the constant barrage of hatreddisgustguiltsorrowlonginggrief raining down on his shoulders. The kind of pain that promises to stick like black tar, clinging to his skin no matter how raw he scrubs it.
A monochrome film settles over his vision. It reduces everything to dull blues and greys. His whole world bleeds away from him as he lays in the sand, as Sherlock's body rests in a locker in the morgue, as James Moriarty's laughter seeps into the edges of his waking moments. His fingers brush over the mug sitting on the coffee table, its contents ice cold with neglect. Sherlock's lips touched this, yesterday. Those same lips that used to spread wide with genuine laughter for him, that turned crimson red when his teeth scraped against them in concentration, that quirked up at the corner with sarcastic amusement.
Sherlock's lips are turning fuzzy in John's memory already, like the grainy photographs his mobile takes. His eyes turn towards the quiet street, and he sees only low-resolution grey.
Gently, the snow accumulates. At the right angle, it looks like broken glass.
The shards in his bloody hands were different. There were brief flashes of moments, of people he didn't recognise, of clothing and technology from ages past and times of which he had never dreamed of viewing. Here, an unfamiliar woman, stood between him and a cowering man stinking of blackmail, her modern bullet careening towards his shaking view. There, the cottage, painted off white, fat bees buzzing lazily across the glass. London fog. London sun. Sussex breezes. Pembrokeshire waves.
He split his palm open with the shard on his right, wedged into the cedarwood of the floor panels, and hardly winces. The mirror is your life, child, once whispered his mother. Guard it well, lest you be split apart and scattered to the cruel winds.
'Oh, Watson,' murmured he, his blood dripping to the floor from his clenched palms. 'Forgive me.'
The second drop hit the floor with a soft thud, and the mirror carves its penance from his life.
Two drops.
Across history, where his soul had been splintered into a thousand pieces, every new version of him lost two years of the life he desired so strongly.
Lestrade comes to John a month after the last of Sherlock settles into the cracks in front of St. Bart's. John can hardly stand to look at him until he stops seeing a traitor and starts observing everything else. The dark bruises under his eyes. The haunted grief, layered behind his downtrodden glances. Wrinkled clothing, shadows across his jawline, pronounced wrinkles... he’s defeated.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lestrade says, hitting his fist against the table. ‘Dammit, I tried, John, I really tried. But I’m not like you. I really didn’t want my life to revolve around Sherlock Holmes, and that was my biggest mistake. I’m sorry.’
It’s not his fault, John thinks, finally accepting it. They’ve all been played. Even Donovan and Anderson were prodded in the right direction. Every one of them are dolls on strings, dancing for the puppeteer, even after the main event.
This time, John listens. This time, he gives Greg a weak smile and raises his glass.
‘Fuck Sherlock Holmes,’ he says in toast.
I forgive you, he means.
‘I forgive you,’ Watson would promise, taking him into his embrace. ‘I am so sorry, Holmes, I forgive you, I forgive you...’
Holmes would smile weakly with his relief, bowing his head into his doctor’s shoulder. He would cling onto Watson’s coat with the conviction of a man who would die if he released his grip.
Affection swelled within him at the thought.
‘My dear Watson,’ he would murmur, raising his head and gazing down upon a gentleman he dares to call his friend, ‘do not apologise. Freedom is upon us.’
In America, Sherlock Holmes meets Irene Adler again. The Woman dangles a cigarette from her manicured fingers, twitching the ashes off of a bridge and into the gently moving river below. There is more snow here than in London, piled gently on top of statues and pushed along the sides of roads and pathways to make way for the steady stream of people walking back and forth. He remembers winters in France, from his childhood, when the mountaintops sparkled like diamonds in the sunlight, ringed with cap-like clouds. Here, the mountains are different, but the same.
They are like him.
‘Have you told him yet?’ Irene asks, turning to look at him.
He scoffs. ‘That I’m alive? Please.’
She raises an eyebrow, and he knows that’s not really what she’s asking.
‘No,’ he says, and he can’t look at her pitying gaze anymore, so he diverts his attention.
Her hair is down in a braid over her shoulder, and her makeup is sparse–just eyeliner, dark and simple and ordinary. If he were a lesser man, if he hadn't seen her out of his shower, he wouldn't have recognised her. He wonders if she feels the same way about him.
She looks completely at home. She has claimed this place as hers, settling into it as easily as her Belgravia property, but he has no doubt that she could just as easily uproot herself and move on without a care. He might pretend to do the same, but he knows that he will never truly feel at home anywhere but his little-big flat with his little-big flatmate and his crime-solving and the familiarity of the little hollow he’s created for himself in his city.
She is so very sharp. She understands. ‘It's not too late,’ she says quietly, leaning on the guardrail, ‘to fix it.’
He has 127 days, says the phantom cuts in his hands that have taken his price. ‘Not yet,’ he answers. There are people to stop, and futures to end, paths to carve and security to find. There are friends to save and villains to erase and a light at the end of the tunnel, waiting for him. 127 days.
She nods and kisses his cheek, leaves her mark on his skin in red lipstick as she presses the thumb drive he wants into his palm.
‘He’ll be gone,’ she warns, ‘if you wait too long. And there’s no way to go back.’
He looks away, tucking the information away into a pocket. ‘Perhaps it’s better that way.’
It’s winter. He can see his breath in front of him like smoke, little insignificant wisps of nothingness. The cold numbs everything with a pleasant shiver, and John feels like a ghost in his own body. He wonders if he leaves footprints in the snow. He never looks to make sure.
He goes up onto that rooftop and stands on the ledge, looking down at the pavement. It has long since been scrubbed clean, but he can't help musing that there are still traces left, lodged into tiny cracks where they trickled through.
He thinks, so that's what he saw, as he peers down at the little people, walking over the spot as if nothing had ever happened there.
What would they do if they remembered? Would they even care that a great man died on that very stretch of concrete?
Would they care if two different stains of violent crimson seeped into the crevices?
In the end, he's too cowardly to step forward. Instead, he goes home and pours the rest of the bottle of cheap whisky sitting out on the table down the sink. It’s been two years. It’s time to stop feeling sorry for himself. There’s Mary to think about, now: the pretty nurse who seems to look past his bouts of depression. He thinks she knows that he won't let go of his ghosts, but unlike the rest of them, she’s willing to share. Isn't that so kind of her? Doesn't he owe her something for that?
He turns to the living room and sees a man with a dark coat and eyes like glacial glass and blood matted in his curls and blurry lips and John flinches, as he always does, before he closes his eyes and counts his breaths. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
There’s no one there. There won't ever be anyone there, when his mind tricks him with fear and anger and guilt.
How lovely is she, thought Watson, pressing a kiss to her cheek and drawing delighted laughter from her soft lips. Beautiful, delicate desert flower, tolerant of his dual devotion but capturing his attention all the same. Lovely Miss Mary Morstan, with her golden hair and gentle smile and her sweet love.
How lovely is she, thought he as he held her close to his chest and stroked her swelling belly through her skirts, feeling his child kicking with health and petulance at his touch. Resilient Mrs. Mary Watson, who kept his grief grounded and chased away, with her comforting warmth, the spirit who haunted his dreams.
How lovely is she, thought he, pressing a wet cloth to her forehead and willing her body to hold itself together with his doctor’s touch. Strong Mary, who fought for her life and their baby’s with each shuddering breath and feverish smile.
How lovely is she, thought he as he stood at her side, warming her cold skin with his shaking hands. Brave Mary, who wept for him and his chronic loneliness and gripped his hand tightly with her fragile fingers and apologised for stealing his child from him with her dying breath.
How lovely was she, thought he as he watched them lower the coffin into the frozen ground, the priest’s monotone words sounding only like full noises under the crushing silence of her heart, sealed away in a wooden box with her broken body and their lost little girl. Generous Mary, who shared him with a memory and never asked for all of him, who left him because he wasn't paying close enough attention.
How lovely was she, wondered he as he left a bouquet of roses to die in the snow atop her grave.
How perfect was he, mused he as he left his heart on the frosted tombstone of his ghost on the other side of the cemetery.
Sherlock rifles through his suitcase with hasty fingers when they catch, not on clothing, but the razor-sharp edge of paper. He winces and examines the thin red lines across the pad of his index finger, welling with blood, before wiping it off carelessly on his jacket and reaching in more carefully.
The book is old, leather-bound and flaking away at the spine. Gingerly, he examines it, tilting it up in the light and reading the faded gold-leaf letters that remain.
HE H UND F TH B SKE V L S
He flips it open, but the pages are blank, yellowed with age but empty of all ink. He thumbs through all of them, suspicion set low in his chest. Not a single word on any pages, but taped to the back cover is a shard of glass, the length and width of one of his fingers and jagged along the edges, where pieces of it have splintered off from impact. He holds it up at eye level and realises, belatedly, that it is a shard of a broken mirror.
He drops it like it scalds, the way dry ice burns against bare skin. It falls to the floorboards with a jarringly loud clatter. The glass does not shatter any further, but the image in the mirror isn't of the ceiling in his safe house; it’s of a dusty room, lit by a flickering oil lantern. The detective hesitates, then reaches for it again.
One day. One day, but he can't go back yet, because the job isn't quite done, his friends not yet safe, his future not secured. One day, and he looks into the shard and knows that what he sees is not the world that belongs to him. It doesn't sit right. He knows because he remembers this, the oil lantern and the configuration of beams in the ceiling, but that memory is painted in sepia tones and smoke and politeness and secrecy.
If he puts his ear close enough to the mirror, he thinks he can hear Watson’s pen against the pages of his manuscripts, hear the rustle of his tweed sleeves against the table, the steady breathing that follows his concentration.
One day passes into none. Old scars in his palms sting with phantom pain. Sherlock rips his cheap bed sheet into strips and wraps the mirror with the same care he takes in cleaning his wounds.
The book is carelessly tossed into the fireplace. Sherlock suspects Mycroft’s meddling, though he cannot fathom the reason that his brother would understand the significance of his message. In the end, he supposes the reasoning is insignificant, and he settles down to watch the empty pages burn.
It’s Harry who gives it to him. It’s an old pocketwatch, the key to wind it lost to the changing of hands and years in the attic, burnished brass with her initials etched into the surface. He vaguely remembers seeing it before, in his grandfather’s study when he was a boy on visits out to the countryside. It warms in his hand as he examines it, wondering if the grooves at the keyhole are the same as the grooves in his mobile’s charging port from a lifetime ago.
Curiosity and boredom prompt him to pry it open, when Mary is covering a double shift at the clinic for a sick colleague and a little velvet box weighs heavily in his pocket. The timepiece has long since frozen at 8:32. He frowns at it, rubbing at the dirt lodged in the crevices, before turning his attention to the mirror in the top half of the watch. He scrubs at it with a cloth, but no matter how much he tries, the image reflected doesn't sit right. It’s too dusty. Too dark.
He holds it closer to examine it before cursing and snapping it shut with lightning speed, because the eye reflected back at him? Too bright. Too clever. And he will not tolerate ghosts in his head any longer.
When he opens the pocketwatch again with trembling, fumbling fingers, all he sees is the moisture threatening to spill from his tired, tired eyes.
There’s a little velvet box weighing heavily in his pocket. ‘Time to move on,’ he tells the watch. Evidently, it doesn't agree.
Sherlock comes back on a Tuesday. He’s 57 days late, but it seems like 57 years, stretching the bowstring of his body taut with anticipation, dread, remorse, and a layer of arrogant hope and importance. There’s a bow tie and an ill-conceived plan and an eyeliner moustache and fear in John Watson’s eyes, like he’s set eyes upon a ghost, a hallucination, that he has seen too often before.
Sherlock remembers this. Or, rather, something lurking at the back hallways of his mind does: The horribly afraid expression. The deep swallow. The panicked glance around the room for someone to say, yes, I can see him too, you’re not as crazy as you think.
But that smoke-filled memory is followed by no confirmation and a dead faint, because, of course, the real ghost haunting them was of Mary Watson, who was once Mary Morstan and who, he can conjecture, is the blonde nurse (liar) who confirms his reality with a quickly sobering glance up at him, eyes wide with surprise and confusion.
And John is no fainting damsel when confronted with reality and tangibility. So Sherlock fumbles his way through what he meant to be a lighthearted reunion, modelled after images of this moment that had kept him running for the end of those 787 days of ghost-like existence, and he says all the right things mangled to sound utterly and completely wrong.
But even when the first touch Sherlock receives from John is the feeling of his hands in his lapels, shoving him to the floor and threatening to strangle the life out of him, he can only feel relief with his disappointment. Even when the shard in his pocket rips holes in the fabric and jabs at his skin, he knows that those 24 months, 57 days, 12 hours, 32 minutes, and 19 seconds were utterly worth his second, third, fourth, hundredth chance to change the story.
‘My dear Watson,’ said Holmes, ‘I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea that you would be so affected.’
Hatreddisgustguiltsorrowlonginggrief. It’s been two years and 57 days, and John doesn’t know what to do when that cloying smog of deadly emotion suddenly disappears.
Just a magic trick.
He’d just found his order. His world had just begun to make sense again. But now, God, now he has hope and terror when he sees blue eyes watching him with such reckless abandon and can only envision them framed in crimson stains when he sleeps by Mary’s side.
Loss leaves its scars. He doesn’t know how to reconcile the remorse and the devotion and the need to just hold Sherlock close and never let go with the black gravestone and Mary’s devoted love. He wants to scream and shoot the walls and punch someone, but he won’t lose control again. He’s a doctor, after all, and has to maintain some semblance of sanity.
He can forgive; he won’t forget.
But.
But his hallucination is real.
The relief is crushing.
Of course, Sherlock had foreseen the consequences. Everything occurs out of order from the expected, but enough of it is predictable. John’s wedding, for example. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. This time, Sherlock has a much smaller window of opportunity. They are much older.
But some things are different. For example, now, he truly enjoys Mary’s company. For once, John’s choice in women wields someone who is willing to share his attention with Sherlock. She is someone who can think a little more clearly, who reaches conclusions sometimes faster than her partner, who knows how to keep Sherlock’s irritation at incompetence from flaring at inconvenient times, and who can, on occasion, make him smile.
Incredible, that he thought he could have grown to love her, as she had become as much a part of John as himself. How blind he’s become, in his quest to make John happy and make up for all of the hurt he’s caused.
How had he forgotten to search for the tiger, hunting at Moriarty’s side?
How could he not have seen those cunning, feline traits in her eyes? How had he overlooked the preciseness of her aim? How had he managed to ignore that wrongness in this Mary Watson?
Cat lover. Secret. Clever.
Liar.
He admits to himself that she may be the most brilliant foe he has ever faced, because she has one distinct advantage: She is his friend.
She is his friend, no matter the great cat that lurks behind her smile, and he is willing to do everything for the people he holds close enough to his chest to trust.
She is his friend, and for all of her faults and mistakes, it feels like a betrayal when he looks John Watson in the eye and means I love you when he says, ‘Sherlock is actually girl’s name.’
It is a new year when he steps off the plane, heart hammering in his chest and Moriarty’s laughter ringing in his ears and the guilty swell of hope at the wedding ring no longer on John’s finger and the toll that her secret tigress and his secret admission have taken on their futures.
John looks into that mirror in his frozen pocket watch and sees sepia tones, smoke swirling from a pipe, a double-brimmed cap shading a sharp, ageing face, a gorgeous little cottage in Sussex Downs with bees and flowers, peace and Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
It’s a dream. A fantasy disguised as a memory. An admission of his own. But he’s oh so scared, because his daughter is days from being born and Mary’s already received his promise of forgiveness and voluntary ignorance and Sherlock is so quiet these days, absorbed in a mystery greater than their little domestic problems.
He’s needed to escape that suffocating loudness of Mary’s pained smiles and the weight of his wedding band in his pocket for days, but the Baker Street flat sits empty with its inhabitant investigating on his own, and John has few places to go. So he finds himself in Mrs. Hudson’s kitchen, a cup of freshly-brewed tea and a full English fry-up steaming in front of him.
‘It’s a bit nippy out there,’ she comments, peering outside. ‘It’s supposed to snow, soon. Wouldn’t that be lovely? A last chance to see it before next Christmas.’
His former landlady is so much stronger than she looks. He’s an ex-army doctor, not a psychologist, but even he knows that she’s watched the whole world turn against her, falling apart all around her, but here she stands, iron-will and steadfast, quiet bravery wrapped up in a flower-print dress and a tendency to irresistibly mother-hen. She’s now lived through Sherlock’s death twice, and he’ll eat that damn pocketwatch alongside his comfort food if she doesn’t see the detective as her own son. He suspects she thinks the same of him, and it warms his heart, seeing her smile at him when she coos about Mrs. Turner or the husbands next door as she busies herself around her kitchen.
‘I would think so,’ he agrees, smiling and raising his mug in toast. ‘I’d love to shove a handful down Sherlock’s back, just for a laugh.’
She giggles at that, her eyes crinkling at the corners from the smiles she hands out so easily to them, her boys. It’s worth it, he thinks, to cheer her.
She’s so unchanging. Being in her kitchen makes him forget that he’s trying to fool himself into believing that any other address is his home. Like nothing has changed.
The mirror burns in his pocket.
In the end, everything falls into place, the way broken glass can be fitted back into its original mouldings.
Moriarty’s puzzle is carefully crafted to make Sherlock lose, no matter how hard he fights. He realises belatedly that a battle he can’t win requires only thoughts on how to pick up the pieces.
He isn’t there to remember the events properly. He knows only that there had been an incident: A sniper’s bullet and a rush to the A&E and John Watson, eyes glazed with shock and his chest and arms covered with Mary’s blood.
‘She saved my life,’ the doctor says into Sherlock’s chest when the detective catches his sagging body in the waiting room. ‘She saw something, didn’t even think twice, just shoved me out of the way and took the bullet.’ He looks up at Sherlock with fear, an expression he only recognises as the man’s reaction to what he believes to be a ghost. ‘The baby. Oh, God, Sherlock, what have I done?’
‘Nothing,’ Sherlock finds himself saying, holding John tightly against his chest. Embraces aren’t awkward anymore, not when he’s learned the exact cadence of John’s heart beating in his anxiety, when the warmth of his blogger’s body is enough to keep the panic at the influx of emotions.
Pain. Loss. Heartbreak. Death. Relief.
‘She saved me,’ John says again. He sounds confused and angry and grateful and grieving. ‘She tried to kill you, and she saved you and she’s going to kill me because she’s dead.’
Sherlock watches the sombre-faced doctor approaching from over John’s shoulder.
‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen,’ he steals from the pages of a book. ‘It’s over, John.’
He lets go.
In the mirror, Sherlock watches the lonely doctor, who left his best friend to pursue a happy ending, write a story that will never be read.
He takes the last of the mirror and the watch stolen from John’s pocket, holds them gingerly in his fingers, and hides them away. They are swiftly forgotten.
There is a cottage in Sussex Downs where it was once written that a great detective retired to tend to bees and live out the rest of his days in relative comfort. Now, there is a very satisfied and content woman with her vengeance sated and no more beehives casting shadows over the flower patches.
It doesn’t matter. There are no more words to bind him to the place, and no more reflections to remind him that it is what he was fated to do. 221B Baker Street is good enough, when he has John to keep him from slowly destroying it in his loneliness.
John’s nightmares plague him less as each night passes, but less is not never, and still, he wakes with starts and gasps and screams, clutching for something–or someone–slipping out of his grasp. He cries out Mary’s name, Sherlock’s name, the name of his stillborn child. When it happens, Sherlock doesn't hesitate to pick up his violin and play gentle lullabies to lull John back to sleep.
Sherlock’s nightmares start with a fall and end with a spider’s laughter and shattering glass, mocking him for his failure. He never screams, but John always knows. When it happens, John strokes the curls from his sweat-soaked forehead and doesn’t say a word.
The crackle of lightning and the steady pitter-patter of rain against the pavement announces the end of their suffocating winter.
It’s not perfect. It will never be perfect. They are broken puppets, still trying to convince themselves that they can move without their strings, cut with shards of glass.
John kisses the white scars on Sherlock’s hands. It has been 34 months, 19 days, 8 hours, 45 minutes, and 16 seconds, and finally, he is home.
'My dear Watson,’ said Holmes, cradling his doctor’s face in his hand. ‘Good man, we are free.’