All is Fair in Love and War

Elvanston Street

The bomb had blown a hole straight through the flat, blasting through walls and furniture and joists. Piles of rubble were all that remained of the once-homey place, and everything lay still and saturnine under a shroud of ash. With the ground floor largely decimated, the apartments above were beginning to sink and bow under their own weight. A team was working to erect a support to stop them collapsing altogether, while another was working to smother the electrical fires that sprung up where circuitry had melted.

John ducked hesitantly under the police tape, stepping gingerly on the blackened floor. He could sense Sherlock doing the same behind him, but his focus was all on the scene before him. It wasn't until he rubbed his face and his hand came away wet that he realized he was crying.

Picking a path through the desolate, almost alien, landscape, the blonde man worked his way back to the epicenter of the explosion, which he judged to be the bathroom. Here there was the greatest level of incineration, and it appeared that all the debris had burst in an outward radius from that point.

"Sherlock," John said softly. "Read it for me."

It wasn't as if it was particularly difficult to work out the details himself - the signs were still fresh, still clear, after all - but for some reason he needed to hear the detective say it.

Behind him, Sherlock drew a deep breath.

"Uh, well, the marks in the soot suggest that - that Mary stood here when the bomb went off. Probably Semtex; Moriarty's used it before - you'll remember that, of course. We can't say for sure until they run the tests for the airborne vapor tagging agent, but it's a common enough explosive for building demolition (it's also a tightly controlled substance, but that doesn't mean anything to a man of Moriarty's means), so that seems safe to hypothesize. This was your bathroom; obvious to anyone familiar with the standard layout of the rooms in this building, or to anyone who's been here before, as well as there being the telltale presence of melted shards of glass over there from the mirror. Ah, the ceramic chips on this side came from the toilet, and... the cast iron is from the bathtub. Um..."

"Sherlock," John said in the same quiet, flat tone of voice, "where is my wife's body?"

"John, I don't know that that's a good -"

"Just tell me, Sherlock."

The dark haired detective took another, shakier breath.

"Well, if she was standing here -" He stepped around John and planted his feet on the faint marks on the sooty floor he'd indicated earlier "- the blast appears to have been a particularly strong one - you have entire walls laid out here - but emanating from a small, concentrated area. Balance of probability suggests that she was facing the bomb when it went off, as she'd sent you a text, so she clearly understood what was coming. Relating the size of the blast radius and your wife's BMI, the explosion will have carried her -" He turned and pointed to a spot twenty-odd feet away, where a mass of rubble was piled, "- there."

John turned himself and began walking stoically toward the indicated pile.

"John," Sherlock insisted, catching him by the arm. "I really don't think you should see this."

"I'm a doctor, and a war veteran," John replied stonily. "I've seen people killed in explosions before."

"But this is your wife," the detective pressed. "It's different. There's a sentimental element that -"

"That you wouldn't know anything about." John wrenched his shoulder from Sherlock's grip. "I have to know that she's dead. I have to know that she's not going to come waltzing back into my life two years from now, cool as you please, like nothing is wrong. I have to know she's not coming back." His voice broke on the last word as Sherlock's eyes widened in comprehension; he had meant to hurt Sherlock, wanted him to feel some infinitesimal slice of his pain, but it only hurt all the more to see that he had succeeded.