He is panting as he turns into Giltspur Street, sweat running down unchecked beneath his shirt. He should have left the jumper on the bedroom floor along with everything else. Thanks to the Intranet (password survived the cull, thank God) he knows she's on duty. He passes billboards along the bottom of the ambulance station ('Seeing is Believing - Derren Brown at the Adelphi, this week only') and he knows he's been a bloody fool. Not for believing, but for doubting, for forgetting.

Round past the ambulance station, past those horrific cracks on the pavement he couldn't previously see without retching, not stopping as he enters reception, flashing a decommissioned badge and being grateful a full on cardiac incident was distracting all on duty. Up stairs rather than risk the lifts (paranoia apparently back and bringing a few friends along for the ride), turning a corner and colliding straight into a small, white-coated woman with a tray of slides she miraculously manages to hold onto. Bizarrely, she does not look altogether shocked to see his bedraggled, gasping, crazy-eyed self and gestures towards her lab door.

"I imagine you have a few questions," she says, following him.

~x~

She's given him a glass of water and his heart-rate chance to recover. He must look like hell, but it's familiar territory and he gulps down the drink, keeping eye contact with Molly Hooper, doctor of corpses and haunter of dreams.

"Not so much 'Suicide of Fake Genius', more 'Genius of Fake Suicide', I think," he says.

She nods. "I know you do."

He is angry; he wags his finger at her.

"No - I know you do! You've had me for an idiot. He's alive. Sherlock Holmes is alive!"

She is calm.

"From your investigations?"

He leans forward, eyes wide, pointing at them, jabbing in their direction.

"NO! From my own eyes, because I. Saw. It."

There is a silence, punctuated only by that dripping tap and the muffled murmur of the traffic below.

"I was in this lab, and I wasn't supposed to be. I saw how Sherlock jumped off that roof - bungee rope, smashing through this here window (which I know has been replaced) and sent on his merry way - by you!"

She just looks and he can see no crack in her armour, only hear the slight buzz of a mobile in her pocket.

"I've been going insane, imagining it was all in my head, but I know he's coming back and I know you helped him leave. God!" He buries his sweating face in his hands, beard still present and still irritating. "God, you even kissed him goodbye!"

When they'd realised they'd had witnesses, he'd been given some kind of mind swipe, hypnosis (seeing is believing), he knew that now.

"I was supposed to forget everything, but bits kept on seeping through, triggered by events in the real world. It just kept coming back…" He looks up at her and she looks genuinely distressed, sorry. She was good at empathy, but he'd seen her kiss Sherlock Holmes, he'd seen Sherlock Holmes kiss her, and it hadn't been a peck fit for a maiden aunt. It suddenly dawned.

"He's in love with you, isn't he? He loves you. He's coming back, to you!"

And he knew it would be soon (black cars, window cleaners, Tibet, India, Germany…) and Sherlock Holmes would be back in London.

Molly Hooper is standing now, and she subconsciously touches the buzzing phone in her pocket (third time in five minutes) shaking her head, and he knows she isn't going to tell him. Anything.

"I'm sorry," she says, "but you mustn't worry. Things often have a way of working themselves out. You can't always control what happens in life; often it is what it is."

They are both walking to the door and he does feel some kind of catharsis, some acceptance for telling someone what he believes, and for them not to dismiss it out of hand.

He pauses at the door, turning to see her silhouetted against that window, just as in those resurgent memories fighting so hard to revisit his brain.

"Yes Molly, " he says, feeling a change in the air, a further courage to his convictions. "But sometimes it isn't."

Molly Hooper watches him go, herself harbouring a wriggling little jumble of emotions all fighting for dominance. The phone in her pocket buzzes for the fourth time and is this time opened. Molly cannot repress the smile that hovers about her lips, and she touches them, as if reliving something while reading them.

She hurriedly types a response, but is interrupted by a sharp ring tone before she has the chance to press send.

Holding the phone to her ear with both hands, Molly Hooper cannot prevent a slow, beautiful smile spreading across her face and lighting up her soft brown eyes from the inside out.

"Darling," she says, the weight of the world lifting from her shoulders with the freshest huff of Serbian air.

~x~

EPILOGUE:

"If you pulled that off, I'm the last person you'd tell the truth to!"

Sherlock Holmes contemplates the man opposite. The two years since he last saw Philip Anderson (in person) had been less than kind, and so he endeavours to be.

"Anderson, you wanted the truth - "

"I know the truth, but I'm still waiting to hear it from you!"

Sherlock crosses his long legs, then recrosses them as he sits uncomfortably along Anderson's faded sofa (a homage to the ineffectualness of stain removers) and sighs. If people insist on being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it stood to reason that some type of inconvenience to themselves would be appropriate. Had he himself not been rather inconvenienced by Mr Moriarty and his desire for chaos and corruption? Philip Anderson, in a pique of self-justification, had been snooping around Molly's lab for more damning evidence of fakery and look where it had got him. The man appeared to be continuing in his diatribe, but Sherlock must let him, since he'd made a promise to someone about it.

"Don't bother with the crash mat/body double/face mask nonsense! There's no way any sane person would believe that mish-mash of action film cliches."

"Indeed?"

"Oh yes, indeed. I saw you - you and Molly Hooper. She saved you, got you out. You got me hypnotised (waste of time, I'm obviously not that suggestible) but I saw you smash through that window; I saw you snog the face off her!"

"That doesn't sound like me."

Anderson falters, but only for a second.

"No, no, it doesn't, but there's the genius of the thing - as well as hiding the truth, you just didn't want people to know that you… cared for someone."

"Never an advantage."

"Bollocks."

Sherlock raises a brow, one finger resting against his cheek.

"It's a theory, but holds less water than the one I've told you." Sherlock stands; there is nothing more he can say. He's done all he promised, but Anderson seems to panic in seeing him stride towards the door.

"I remember every detail," he says, wistfully, staring at the man he always knew would come back one day.

"Only lies have detail," murmurs Sherlock Holmes as he departs. "The truth is usually much more simple."

And he smiles to himself as he rattles down the stair well, because the truth was really something rather lovely he'd prefer not to share.

THE END

A/N: Thank you so much to everyone who read, favourited and reviewed this indulgent little slice of whimsy. I love differing points of view, and I love the crazy that is Anderson, so it was a win/win for me.

I realise the haziness of Anderson's presence in the lab that day, but perhaps that story is for another day.

Until then,

E. x