This is the end of Wee Doctor as a fanwork.  I’ve loved your likes and reblogs, your kudos and comments, fan essays and encouragement, your tweets and your amazing art.  I love all of you and I hope this last foray into Wee Doctor was as good a gift as it felt for me to get 1000 followers.  So here it is, the thrilling conclusion!

Summary: Thursday gets meta, things get mental, and Sherlock gets something out of the experience.

Words: 4788

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Sherlock waited in
a convenient mausoleum until it was dark, then grabbed his shovel.  He hoped his assumptions were correct, if they
weren’t this could become a bit messy.
He’d considered what he’d seen of the Watson family, what little Roost
had told him of this not-a-gun, and his own knowledge of John.  Tried to apply it to this Johnny, who already
looked too used to knowing too much and not mentioning it out of politeness,
with the same kindly exasperation of Sherlock’s John.  Sherlock had looked at Bad Davey with his
perfect suit and his suffering eyes tinted pink from crying.  Sherlock recognized the look in Davey’s eyes what
had been lately staring back at him in the mirror, Johnny would have too.

So the question
wasn’t where would Davey hide the
thing, but where would Johnny put
it.  That was what the boy had wanted to
talk to him about after coming back from his little errand.   Being the fifth.  W had been the fifth and now John had needed
someone he could rely on, someone who was curious enough to do the
unrecommendable.  

 So Sherlock stood
at the foot of the grave bearing the name of J Hamish Watson (Father, Brother,
Friend) and admired the tactical position. It had Davey written all over it.  Up on a hill, complete visibility of the area,
and a convenient mausoleum to hide in if it came to it.  He shone the light in a broad sweep, only one
gravestone in the sight of Hamish faced the wrong direction.  When he got to it the other side was blank as
well, like there had been some clerical error.
Or like it was a cold shoulder, a final forgetting.  

 This was it.

 He set his coat
aside and got to work.  Digging was hard
work alone, and it took forever.  He would
have liked to do this with Molly.  The
older, wider, more authoritative Molly who directed him and the Watsons with equal
familiarity.  This Molly, he suspected,
would have found the whole thing funny.
Maybe not funny, maybe just interesting.
The sort of thing a person familiar with the history and culture of her
profession, her art, would appreciate.
Alone, the digging took until he become concerned about the sun rising
and getting caught.  He’d had the vague
sense of hitting something early on, the shock of metal jangling against metal,
but it had been as momentary as a flash of lightning and once the vertigo had
passed nothing had been there.  He
checked his watch, it was almost half past two.
He looked up toward the sky.  The
hole was so far up it was a tiny rectangle, he could block it with his raised
thumb.  He stared at it and took a moment
to discern if he was high.  He looked at
his watch.  It was 2:21.  Probably not him then.

Rooster and Johnny had both implied the not-gun did something to the mind, was this it?  The fantastical clinging to the familiar.

 “This level of hallucination implies a level
of intelligence,” he said.  “Someone is
watching me.  Friend or foe?”

 He considered the
silence. The hole smelled of rich earth, but the hole wasn’t as dark as it
should have been.  He didn’t feel in
danger, but then his sense of danger wasn’t the best.

 “I don’t know what
to do about that.  I only agreed because
I was curious and I wanted answers.”

 The wall in front
of him shivered and there stood the door to 221B, brass numbers and hanger at a
tilt.  John had been here.  Well, he thought, that was as much of an
invitation as he was going to get.  

 On the other side
of the door a tableau was set up.  221B, almost.  There was a plaid blanket he didn’t recognize
over John’s chair, and a finely combed neatness to the flat.  As if it had been too carefully arranged into
itself, into a home.  A facsimile of him
and John sat side by side, their heads together, Johnny leaning against this
tableau Sherlock’s other side – tucked under his arm.  Beyond them where the hall should be rose a vault
door, studded and chained like something out of John’s ridiculous films.  It might as well have been a challenge.

 A sense of deep
dread rushed over him as he reached toward the chained door.  There was a shift on the sofa, a shuffle of
wool and upholstery.  Sherlock reached
out a hand toward the door as a roar of sound reverberated through it in a wave
he felt down to his bones, so loud his knees went out from under him and his
teeth knocked against each other.  A knot
of terror tied itself in his chest as he curled up, tried to protect his head
with his arms.  The chains held for now,
but how long could they hold against something that powerful, something that
could make that sort of sound?

Someone on the
sofa shifted.  The sound from behind the
door went abruptly silent.

 “Careful of that,”
said someone, with John’s familiar humor.
Sherlock opened an eye.

 The man on the
sofa watched Sherlock, his face burned inside out somehow.  Sherlock sank into his eyes the way a stone sank
into the ocean.  He felt at once satisfied
and a curious.  The weighted pull between
those two extremes left him feeling spread thin over too much emotional
space.  The weight of that gaze drove
Sherlock back from the sofa, the little family, into his chair.  

 This wasn’t
John.  This couldn’t have been John.

 He scrunched his
eyes shut as everything tilted.

 The man that
wasn’t John sat in John’s chair and folded John’s hands and leaned forward with
John’s body.  The gravity of the whole
room shifted, the air grew warmer, that flash of heat like getting into a hot
garden shed on a hot day.  It felt like
sitting at the edge of a great abyss.  A
conversation without words.  Sherlock
covered his eyes.

 “I don’t want to
look,” Sherlock whispered.

 “You’re going to
have to, Sherlock,” the man told him.

 The man’s voice
rolled over Sherlock like the waves of the shore, like the waves against the
side of a pirate ship floating and moving and rolling in its orbit like some
planet.

 “I thought you had
deleted the solar system,” the man said.

 Behind Sherlock’s
eyes worlds shifted. “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem?”

 “No,” the man
said.  “The center will hold.  The gyre will tighten.  I’ll make it.
There’s hook and there’s crook and there’s always a third choice.”

 Sherlock turned
his head.  The other Sherlock sat alone
now, no, not alone.  His hand rested on
the top of little John’s head.  The boy
looking younger than the one that had been at the house.  He’d say seven, except for his nose, eight
then and almost nine.  This Johnny was a
memory.  Johnny looked at him with his
father’s eyes, but the demand felt more immediate.  Other Sherlock tilted his head down to rest
for a moment against the soft fluff of the boy’s hair.  Murmuring to the boy back to sleep.  There was take out on the table and a stack
of DVDs.  The other Sherlock smiled, the
expression soft, tired.  Kind.  That was a memory too.  Sherlock didn’t know if he was kind like
that.  That he had that potential.  To be kind.

 The boy slumped
back into the other Sherlock’s shoulder, sleeping even deeper now and
Sherlock’s mouth ticked up at the corner, gentle, as he got out his phone.

 “What’s behind the
door?” Sherlock asked.

 “I thought you’d want
to talk.”  Watson’s amusement warmed him
like sunlight on a cold day.  Sherlock
looked back at him, at the smile lines around his eyes and the grief bracketing
his mouth.

 “I’m getting down
to business.”

 Watson
laughed.  It was a tired sound,
belligerently hopeful and worn in like old shoes.  “That’s you all right, business.”

 “I was told I
needed to find where the gun was leaking to get back home.”

 “Why do you always
want to leave?” Watson asked, the humor leaving his face.

 “I’m not your
Sherlock, you’re not my John.  We don’t
belong here.”  He stopped to swallow,
resettle himself.  “I owe it to my John
to get him back home where he belongs.”

 “You owe him
because you left him?” Watson asked.

 “I’d rather not talk
about it.”

 “I’m sure you
wouldn’t.”  Watson tried to smile.

 “You left him in
this world.”

 “I had to choose
one, one or the other.”

 “Why did there
have to be one or the other?” Sherlock asked.
“Wasn’t there a third choice?”

 “Very good,
Sherlock, always were a fast learner.  Nice
try, but this isn’t about me, not for you.
Why did your John chose her over you, you mean?”

 Sherlock looked at
the man’s eyes again and winced back, his mind pulling away from what he saw.  Too much, too much everything and he saw it all at once.  This wasn’t John, or Hamish, it was just-

 “It’s alright,”
the man said.  “It’s harder without a
psychopomp.  Just ride the gyre again, it’ll
get easier.”

 Sherlock relaxed
and he was back in 221B.  His 221B, the familiar
one, the one with the labeled shelf for experiments and the neat sitting room.

 Hamish tilted his
head.  “There you are.  You were always a hung up about these sorts
of things.”

 “What things?”
Sherlock snapped.

 “Names.  What they mean, what they are.  Still, well done.”

 Sherlock blinked
at him.  He looked a great deal more like
John if one were willing to ignore how big he looked under his skin.  Sherlock leaned forward to get a good look at
him, but all he could see was !!!,
!!!!!!!, !!!!!, over and over again
“How are you still alive?”

 Hamish threw his
head back and laughed, delighted.
“Didn’t you hear?  Hamish Watson,
W, the great and powerful is dead.  He
helped his brother destroy the gun and then he jumped off the roof of St
Bart’s.  Did they really put the last
part of the gun in Grendel’s false grave?
How poetic.  Was there anything
buried there, other than the obvious?
David said he’d take care of Grendel’s body when he took care of
mine.”  He made a face.  “Not at the same time obviously.”

 “Your body was
taken advantage of enough while you lived.
They would have kept the two of you far apart.  I assume one of the boys destroyed your body
out of respect for you?”

 Hamish laughed
again as if Sherlock had said something clever, something wonderful.  “Of course.
Bad Davey.  He’s very sweet.”

 “He’s cruel.”

 “He’s practical.  He never lets himself get pinned in, there’s
always another option you know.  With
people especially.”  Hamish’s composure
almost slipped, but his expression turned just in time.

 “You care about
him a lot,” Sherlock said.

 “A father loves
all his children.”

 “He’s like you,”
Sherlock told him.

 Hamish just
smiled.  Sherlock wondered how the smile
was constructed.

 “You knew I wasn’t
your Sherlock.”

 “I figured that
when you didn’t immediately start asking about John.  The poor man has an obsessive approach to
parenting.  Keeps John on his toes,
otherwise the boy will try to be the grown up.”
Hamish turned to the tableau of his son and his… Sherlock?  “I need Johnny to be able to be a child.  To start again fresh.  Young enough to be remade.”

 “How did you deal
with it?  Taking care of him?”

 Hamish gave him an
annoyed look.  “I don’t know Sherlock,
I’m a conglomeration of the captured memories of a dead man filtered through
your personal experiences and expectations.
You’re dreaming up a magic person to tell you things you can’t know.
You’re lucky you’re getting full sentences.”

 “You do remember a
little bit though.”

 “If I hadn’t I
would have let the door open.”

 “What’s on the
other side?” Sherlock asked.

 “Alright,” Hamish
gave him the sort of look that spoke all too knowing volumes.  “If you want me to admit it, I remember a
lot.”

 “What are you
then?”  Sherlock leaned forward again so
he barely hovered on his chair.

 “Human, just
human.  Dead.  A tall shadow on a short man.  Pick the best of the three to get what you
want.  What does it matter?  All this, it is what it is.”

 “It matters to
me.”  Sherlock narrowed his eyes.  “I want to know what I can ask you.”

 “Anything you
want.”

 Sherlock growled,
John raised his eyebrows.

 “I don’t understand
you and Sherlock.  You weren’t co-parents
in the usual sense.  What were you?”

 Hamish burst out a
sound, a laugh, a sob.  Sherlock couldn’t
tell.  It echoed, as if Hamish was really
very big and had just been tucked down very small to fit.  “Anything.
We could have been anything I wanted.
Didn’t they tell you what I do?”

 “Empathy
weaponized.”

 “Not on
purpose.”  Hamish leaned forward, his
hands on Sherlock’s.  His eyes were black
and blue and dark like a bruise.  “It’s
not on purpose.  I just see people and
understand them.  And I want them to be something,
do something, and they just-  They’d do
anything I wanted.  If I want them to be
helpful, or be angry, or kill themselves.”

 “Or love you,”
Sherlock said.

 Hamish covered his
own mouth with both hands, his head bowed.
The noise he made was supernatural, subhuman.  An anguish which set off from his diaphragm,
caught sail with the air caught in the bottom of his lungs, and surged forward
on a whole sea of grief.  Time and
measures felt set off, everything too early, too late.  Everything out of step.  And that sound, the worst of all.  

 “Even love me,”
Hamish finally agreed.  “Except Tim,
Tim’s too stubborn, he loves me out of pugnaciousness.”  

 If Sherlock ever
needed to be strong, to keep John safe, and the way was hard or terrible or
awful, if that happened he’d remember Hamish’s bowed head.  Remember its vulnerability.  Remember the soft dip from neck to
skull.  

 “People
aren’t.”  Hamish gasped in air, the sound
fibrous and gory.  Sherlock could hear
the tack of the blood on the man’s lips.
“People aren’t things.  They aren’t
boxes to unlock, secrets to expose.  I
couldn’t do that to Sherlock.
Couldn’t-  People aren’t things, I
just wanted people to stop being things and start over.  Give myself time to learn how to control
whatever this is.  And Sherlock.  He was someone I can focus on, someone alive.
I wanted to-  I wanted a
friend.  I had no one.  No one but Tim who’s always had one foot in
some other family.  He collects them you
know, I was just another one.”

 Sherlock
blinked.  He gasped in breath, his
vertigo spreading out from the inward curl of his shoulders.  A dizziness that Sherlock seemed to catch
from the bend of Hamish’s body.  That he
could feel as if it were his own, was it his own?  It must be.

 “I just wanted Sherlock
to be my friend.  I’m just human.  I thought if we were friends it would be
okay.  But.  When a man is a father it’s different.  And it was a relief.  It was just a relief to be done and bury myself.”

 “What about
Sherlock?  You could have relied on him.”

 “I tried.”

 “You sent me
away,” said Johnny from the sofa.  “You
sent me away.  I was scared.  I didn’t know what to do.  I didn’t know what I did wrong.”

 “I was so
helpless,” Hamish said into his hands, as if he was finishing his son’s
thought.  His voice was tiny enough to
fit in Sherlock’s hand, tiny enough he could close a fist and hide it. “I was
so helpless and small.  If it hadn’t been for Tim…  I don’t know what would have happened if it
hadn’t been for Tim.”

 There was so much
suffering in Hamish’s voice.  So much
gratitude conjoined with anger simmered down to pain.

 “That’s all I
wanted.  A friend I could belong
with.  A friend who would be separate,
complimentary,” Sherlock felt out the words, spoke them for Hamish.

 It was hard for
Sherlock to believe in kindness when he saw people’s vices on their sleeves and
upper lip and the way they tied their shoes.
Hamish though.  The thought of
even accidentally treading on Sherlock’s consent wracked him with torment.  Filled him with anguish.

 Sherlock believed
him.  That something had happened and his
empathy had surged out of his control.  That
slipping up terrified him, the way it would have become easier and easier.  The path of least resistance.  The line would have kept blurring.  He could never have been sure.

 Sherlock would
have to prove his agency constantly, but he had neither the personality nor
predilection for that sort of long term consistent check pointing.  Sherlock liked romanticism in his philosophy
and pragmatism in his routine, as long as he was satisfied he wouldn’t disturb
a working model.  He would bend in ways
that had nothing to do with petri dishes in the refrigerator and everything to
do with his life slowly rotating around Hamish.

 Sherlock
remembered the hollow-eyed man calmly talking about how right and correct it was
for a man to pull out his own teeth and swallow them like so many bitter
pills.  That was what Hamish had tried to
protect his Sherlock from.  The worst
kind of yes sir.  The kind that Sherlock would find comfort
in as he plasticized by increments.  Until
Hamish had killed him.

 Had anyone ever
loved Sherlock that much in his life?
Loved him so much they would refused to risk dehumanizing him?  Denied themselves to avoid overwhelming Sherlock,
controlling him in the way Sherlock had shown he detested in a thousand little
ways.

 Maybe someone already
did.

 Maybe they already
were.

 “Oh,” Sherlock
said.  Then a sick feeling hit his
stomach.

 “What a clever
boy,” Hamish told him.  They were sitting
in the Diogenes, Hamish was in Mycroft’s chair.
(The door back out to the lobby was the door with the chains on it.)  He tilted his head at Sherlock.  Smiled.
It went all the way into his eyes in a way Sherlock hadn’t seen in a
long time.  

“You were faking.”

“Come on,
detective, you can do better than that.”
He traced words in the air with his finger over the clouds of !!!, hand scrawled and bright white.

“You were…
helping?”

Hamish blinked,
looked away, there was a blur and shudder to him like old film played too fast.

“You’re dying.”

“I told a truth to
help you see the truth.  You wanted to know why he chose her
over you, you wanted to know why he was so furious.”

“Because he was giving me space, he knew I’m not good with…
people and he let me chose.  But then I
didn’t even give him a chance to chose.”

“I want you to be
happy,” Hamish closed his eyes, turned his head so he was in profile.  “You made me so happy.  Watching you at crime scenes.  You’re so curious.  And you keep trying.  Even when you’re pretending you’re not
scared.  Even when you’re pretending
you’re not lonely.  The work!  The game!
It’s when you’re at your best.
And then you took care of John.
The boys needed a stable point, something fixed, but every fixed point
needs to be fixed to something.”  He
breathed out.  Pain scrawled out in chalk over his breath.  Tremor appeared
over his hand.  “And you need to let go,
you need to let yourself be happy with them, with him.  You can’t go back.  ”

“You say that like you have personal experience,” Sherlock
said.  “Roost told me Grendel wanted to
go back to something, what was it?”

 “I think for him it was freedom.  That if he could just kill you, destroy you,
he would be free.”

 “Who was he?”

“He was a lot of things.
His name was Doyle.  He knew you
once, a version of you, some versions of you.
Something changed, he believed you trapped him.  If he could destroy you and go back, scrap
you like a bad draft and start all over again, then everything would be fine. ”

 “But it wasn’t.”

 “No.”

 “And he couldn’t.”

 “No.”

 “The story you’re letting the others believe about you isn’t
true.”

 “Of course not,” Hamish said.  “It’s not just my story and I’m a father and
a brother first.  That’s the way of
things.  Besides, Doyle died long
ago.  Ages before Grendel became Grendel.”

 “How did you keep him from killing me then?” Sherlock
asked.  His hands curled over the
vulnerability of his belly, his heels pulled close to his body.

 “I told your story.  You
were too well loved,” Hamish told him.

 He stared at Hamish.

 Hamish stared back.

 “That’s it?”

 As Hamish turned his head to look away there was a cascade
of images that finally settled back into himself.  “You gave me everything I could ever, ever
have wanted.  A chance to be close to
someone without hurting them.  A third
choice.  So yes, that’s it.  You were loved too well to die.”

 “And you weren’t?”

 “I was tired, Sherlock.
I’ve been fighting Doyle for years with words and sympathy.  Struggling to get one more word on the page
of your life, one more line.  I held out
until others could take over.”

 “Your family,” Sherlock said.

 “Your family.  Your
friends.  I almost died myself more than
once.  I went to dark places.  He had a terrible memory for people and facts,
he’d make a mess and I’d have to wade through it.  Married or not married?  Orphan or parents?  He made more than a few mistakes that had to
be cleaned up.”

 “You’re not real at all, are you?  You’re just a convenient face.”

 Hamish looked at him.

 “You know, they tried to catch Jack the Ripper once by
shining a light through the lens of the eye of one of his victims.  They thought the last thing a person saw
would be trapped there,” Sherlock told him.

 “Did it work?”

 “How long do you have until you’re gone?”

 “Not long now.  I’m
not sure how that translates to real time.
But I can feel it,” he wiggled his fingers.  “The border of memory.”

 “Then help me before you go.
We were brought here from another universe.  Your sons told me a part of the gun is
leaking.”

 “It’s here.  I trapped
what’s left of Grendel here.  He became
the door the Big Bad Wolf keeps huffing and puffing against.  I had to contain the part of him that didn’t
self-destruct on the roof.”

 “What will happen when you disappear then, it’ll break out
again?”

 “Something like that.
I don’t know.  As I weaken so do
the walls keeping it in, the energy bleed is helping The Thing keep from
burning up what’s left of Grendel.  I can
guess based on what I learn, I can’t begin to imagine how it would unravel in
your world where my boys aren’t there to apply pressure.  To keep order.”

 “To keep the third option.”

 “Very good, Sherlock.”
Hamish looked nearly heartbroken.
“Always a quick study.  Out of
your siblings you were always the one closest to me.”

 “Then help me.”

 “What should I do, Sherlock?” Hamish asked.  “You decide.”

 “I don’t want to,” Sherlock said, stomped his foot, felt
eight.  Felt younger.  Felt the tide on his shoes.  Felt the blue of the ocean.  The pirate ship on an infinity of sea, a
planet cushioned along its starry orbit.
“You already know what needs to be done, why can’t you tell me the
answer?”

 “Because it’s not something I can ask you.”

 “How long will you be here?” Sherlock asked.

 “I’m not really here, Sherlock.  I’m just a man at a door, holding it
closed.  A shadow of a man.”

 “Holding the door closed on a hole in time and space?  That’s quite the shadow.”

 “I was quite the man,” Hamish told him, closed his
eyes.  They fell back into the embrace of
221B.  A shadow Sherlock snoozed next to
Hamish on the sofa.  The smell of tea and
tomato sauce filled the air.  Some
details were sloppy, others meticulous beyond realism.  Sherlock watched them from his chair.

 The man – the other Sherlock – looked warm, luminous,
happy.  

 “What would happen if you left suddenly instead of fading
slowly?”

 Hamish opened his eyes and rested his head on the false
Sherlock’s shoulder.  The Sherlock sighed
and started scrolling through his phone.

 “What would happen if you and the door and the walls
disappeared all at once?  Would the thing
destroy what’s left of Grendel?  Would it
destroy its own door in?”

 Hamish took a ragged breath in, then out.

 Sherlock stared past him.
“I have to take you out with me.
I have to pull you into my head and leave with you, quick enough the gun
will devour itself before it realizes.”

“I’m sorry.  Whatever you chose, I trust you, trust you to
be strong, to be good, to make your own choices and have a reason for them,”
Hamish whispered.

 “But it’ll work,” Sherlock clarified.  “Carrying you out inside me will work.  If you’ll help me.”

 “He’ll always help you,” the Other Sherlock told him as one
might tell the family of a dying man.
“All he’s ever wanted is to help you.
But you’ll have to be brave.”

 “I’m known for my
bravery,” Sherlock told him.

 The pretend Sherlock shifted, changed.  There was a sharpness to his features that
was unreal, a Sherlock boiled down to bone and shadow and too high
cheekbones.  “You won’t remember.”

 “What won’t I remember?” he asked.

 “This, this whole thing,” Hamish told him.  Waved his hand through the air like a monarch,
221B rippled.  “Coming here, seeing
it.  Once I’ve dissipated you’ll forget
this ever happened. Self-defense you know.
Your brain will rewrite it into something else.”

 “It’ll be totally gone?” Sherlock breathed out.

 “Nothing totally leaves organic matter,” Hamish assured him.

 Sherlock let out a breath of epiphany, his hands coming together
in front of him.  When he leaned back it
was against a mast, Baker Street disappearing in the wake of a pirate ship.  “You’ll change my brain, you’ll leave a
footprint of yourself.  I’ll be more like
you, less like me.”

 “That’s why I couldn’t ask, you had to choose.  Do you feel the tide?” Hamish looked out at
the sea, hands tight on the railing, his face tense.  The phantom Sherlock had left them.  It was only the two of them now.

 “Take my hand, Hamish.” Sherlock reached out.  “I’ve made my choice.”

 Hamish’s hand was dry, strong, controlled.   “It’s okay, right?  It’s not really me.”  He closed his eyes, breathed in deep.  “I’ve already escaped.  I’m not really dying, right?”

 Sherlock clasped Hamish’s hand tight in his.  “You must let go.”

 “I want to,” Hamish sobbed.
“He wants to have me.  My
children.”

 “John’s Sherlock is taking care of them.  Let me take care of you.  Help me be strong.”  Where their hands touched there was a shock,
a burn.

 “I’m alone,” Hamish’s voice cracked.  “I’ve been so alone.”

 Sherlock took him into his arms.  “So have I.
Hold tight to me.  Hold tight.”

 “I love you,” Hamish told him, arms set round him like a
universal law.

 Sherlock tried to hold on just as sure, tried to be just as
brave.  There was a roar of rage over the
horizon as some terrible thing began to tear itself asunder in its fury.  “What will happen to us?”

 “We’ll be a thousand different people and a thousand
different things, and they’ll all be wonderful, and all of them will be loved
too much to ever die.”

 “Sounds dangerous,” Sherlock told him already feeling the
world go solid around him, already feeling pavement under his feet.

 Hamish laughed.  “And
yet here you are.”

 There was a tingle like an electric shock and Sherlock stood
next to John and Mary on a street corner.
Somehow he knew they were back even as he wondered back from where even as the ghost of memory solidified as he
focused on it.  Three bright sons, Molly and Greg, that he
could be happy.  There was a voice in the back of his
mind, distant, almost fading, that told him to go on then and be happy.  It
sounded a bit like John if more tired and more affectionate.

 “That’s it then?” Mary said, looking a bit surprised at the
whole thing and a little put out she had missed the action even as her brow
furrowed trying to hold the memory.

 “Yes,” said Sherlock.
“That was it.”