Chapter Text
You are Peter Sigerson.
Or, you appear to be. In reality you are Sherlock Holmes, the one and only consulting detective, the vanquisher of the dreaded Professor Moriarty. And therein is where the problem lies - he may be dead, but his minions are not. Too many of them walk free. Moran walks free. And other criminals, too; people who swore vengeance against you and your cunning ways, people who you never caught, or who you caught but failed to prevent their escape. Despite what you want people to believe, you are not a machine. You are not perfect. And where you are right now proves that. You allowed Moriarty to escape. You allowed him to hunt you down.
But you know that, with the haunting scream of his plunge to death over the Reichenbach Falls, a golden opportunity has fallen into your hands. Everyone but Moran believes you dead. Moran is a formidable opponent, but he is one man. You can outrun him, you can disguise yourself, you can shake off his pursuit. And that is exactly what you have done.
Somewhere, Watson is grieving. But you cannot picture what this would look like. It is hard to picture anything besides the smashing of the rocks and the screaming of the Falls.
You try not to think about how long it will be before you can return to London again.
You are Nigel Griffiths.
Everything is strange to you. You miss home. You miss seeing signs written in your native language. You miss familiarity.
Perhaps you would be more excited about seeing faraway corners of the world, if you could share the experience with someone.
Your funeral has happened by now. The image of Watson in black, a bouquet of flowers in his hands, haunts your dreams. You and Watson should have been surrounded by flowers in another, brighter ceremony; if the world was better, if you were back by his side. You never asked him if he wanted to have a secret version of that ceremony with you. You always thought that you would have more time. That your mistakes would never catch up to you in a way that mattered.
You were supposed to be the unbeatable Sherlock Holmes. Your current predicament started out as a way to keep you safe, as a way to maintain that streak. But you begin to wonder if your mind has played a trick on you. You do not feel like a victor.
You are Samson Wright.
It has been surprisingly easy for you to get used to changing names; perhaps because it hurts too much to think about yours.
You already have a list of names to use in the future; you spend long hours of the day silent, mind whirring with aliases you could assume, if questioned. You are limited in your range of disguises by the amount of languages that you know; to assume an identity that reasonably matches the part of the world you hide in, you would either have to learn a new tongue extremely quickly, or become a phenomenal bluffer. You used to be one, back on your home turf, but here, in this unpredictable terrified new life, you find yourself lacking in the confidence that used to make you so inscrutable.
You cannot slack. You cannot stop to think, to rest, to feel your loss. You cannot forget Moran. You do not feel like your old self, but you will have to lie like him anyway.
You are Charles Blakewell.
In one day your reality was turned inside out. You wonder, more often than you should, if one different choice would have changed everything that day. If you had run towards Watson instead of the wilderness. If you had turned back from Reichenbach as soon as you got the note that you were certain was a sham. If you had never come to Switzerland at all.
It was Moriarty who drove you to this point. Fear of his retaliation prompted you to go to Switzerland. His note lured Watson away from your side. You let yourself be fooled because, deep down, you believed with a dark certainty that he would get you eventually. That there was no other way for this story to end. You don’t know why you ran - when you look back to that memory, all you see is blind fear, and you hate the sensation of not knowing - but you wonder if it was for the same reason.
But it is no use cursing Moriarty for your fate. Moriarty is dead. Your past is dead. Watson may as well be dead, for all that you know.
This is the thought that will keep you up tonight. What if he got sick? What if he couldn’t handle your loss? What if Moran turned his eyes on Watson as a substitute for you?
What if Watson is dead?
You are Silas Moore.
It has been too long since you have had an honest conversation with anyone. When your disguise requires you to go out in public, you stand off to the side and you get lost in memory. Even if people talked to you, you would have nothing to say. The only thing you can think about is how far away you are from everything else you have known. The only thing you can hear is the roaring of the Falls.
This stops you from feeling safe, but it does not stop you from getting up at the beginning of every day. Not yet.
You are Nicholas Shaw.
It was your choice to run. You have a vague recollection of Moriarty’s limp body bouncing off a rock. You remember the colossal, all-consuming rush of water deafening your ears. You remember climbing. Hearing a rock whoosh past you. Slipping. Falling.
Running away from Watson, into the desolate dark.
You know that the circumstances forced your hand. But still, no one made you run. No one made you change your name, and then change it again, and again, and again. You had anticipated that Reichenbach would be a test, but you’d thought that it would be a test of who had a stronger will, you or Moriarty. You never meant for it to be a test of whether you would choose help or self-sabotage.
It can’t be that simple. There has to be an alternate explanation, right? This cannot really be your true nature. You were supposed to be a hero, triumphing over your natural enemy. You were supposed to live up to what Watson thought you were, what Mycroft hoped you would achieve. You were not supposed to be this.
You are Harry Warner.
You picked this one because of Watson. You remember how upset you made him when you guessed all of his brother’s sad history, and it doesn’t feel like a bad memory anymore. You ache to be back in that moment, or anywhere but here, and then you don’t want to think about this memory anymore. You plan the right time to disappear and change your name to something else.
You are Basil Grady.
You do not understand how your brain has turned into this. You always used to have a propensity for fits of melancholy, and this is not the first time that you have lived in a perpetual state of fearing both the past and the future, but even so. You were principled. You had resolve. You knew how to cope, and how to climb upward.
Now everything has changed, and you can feel your mind digging itself as deep as you can. You did not fall in Reichenbach, but your mind has broken in the hard year - years? - since, as completely as if you were dashed face-first against the rocks. Now you are drowning in the depths of paranoia and heartbreak, and the world is trying to fix Moriarty’s last mistake.
No. Your survival was not a mistake. You are alive for something. You struggle to remember what that something is, but it has to exist.
The possibility of finding your way back to England. That can be it. The possibility of reuniting with Watson, with your casework, with your violin and your pipe and everything you love in the world. That is, if Moran doesn’t find you first.
You wish that you didn’t see it as a certainty - him finding you first.
You are Victor Norris.
It has been too long since you slept soundly through the night, since you associated the dark with warmth and Watson and comfort instead of coldness and sadness and danger. It’s getting harder and harder for you to close your eyes. You feel watched even when you’re not.
How is it going to happen? When you are caught, how will they kill you? What country will you die in? You have wandered across many places, though you can’t remember all of their names unless you think hard. You do not feel like you could be found on a map. You do not feel like you could walk far enough and come to the sea, and then to Britain and home on the other side. You are separated, by secrecy and by isolation, from everything you used to know. You are in the outer reaches of space, and you know nothing about where you are or how to get back.
You are Richard Evans.
You are separated from every aspect of your old life, the habits both positive and negative. You sometimes entertain the idea of taking cocaine, but with your remaining reason you doubt that it would make much of a difference in your mental state. You already feel that you are not real.
You are Sydney Prescott.
Your mind is skipping like a broken record. You only think about the past and how you went wrong. You miss a million things, but most of all you miss him, and you can’t think about it too hard because it makes you want to scream into the wilderness. And that would bring Moran upon you.
You are sleep-deprived and you see him behind trees, lurking in crowds, hidden in shadows. Sometimes the fear comes upon you and bowls you over like a wave, and then you panic and run and hide somewhere, and everyone around you wonders what is wrong with you.
In those moments, sometimes the only thing that gets you to stand up again is the daydream of Watson’s hands on your shoulders, his eyes looking into yours, his voice urging you on, his breath on your lips.
But it is not real.
Getting up always brings the dissolution of the daydream, and as you pull together your resolve you curse yourself for every choice and circumstance that led you here.
You wonder more and more often how much of this it will take before you don’t get up at all.
You are Cecil Williams.
You can’t remember the last time you didn’t feel tired. You stumble through each day a mess of worry and grief and then you collapse onto a bed or the ground and you try to find oblivion. Just like everything else, it eludes you.
You are getting careless. You are making mistakes. It won’t be long before someone notices that you are out of place and then Moran will find you.
You miss Watson and you miss the person you used to be.
You are Arthur Marwood and your memory is fading.
You have long since been quiet, constantly turning your memories of your old life over and over in your head. But recalling your past does not bring you pain anymore. You have grown numb to it. Details slip through your hands: the year that a case took place, the number of books in your study, the amount of left turns that you need to make before finding the shortcut that leads to an old hideout. Six? Seven?
You do not know how to resolve this.
Something unsightly and diseased has happened to your brain, and you have no one to turn to. Your only friends may not exist for all you know. Everything you have ever loved is thousands of miles away.
You remember having a purpose beyond survival but it feels so far away.
You fear forgetting your past. You fear forgetting your name.
Even if you do, though, why would it matter when you will never need to use it again?
If a consulting detective loses his mind in the middle of the wilderness, does it matter?
You are nothing.
You are a nameless bookseller.
You go back to London and no one pursues you. You do not need makeup to make the bags under your eyes match the age of your costume. You wake up every morning and forget what happened the day before. The only thing that convinces you to get up is the knowledge that soon you will be able to stop.
You are in the street and the air is filled with gossip about a murder.
You are in a crowd and you see him.