For a second, for only a fraction of a second, John hesitated.
Where had this doubt come from? Why was he letting his heart affect his calm, cool, disciplined, mind?
Where were his nerves of steel? He was acclimatised to this sort of violence, after all.
And he was losing precious time.
For some reason, though, he had the briefest urge to run away. Run, right now, find another battlefield in another place. Forget.
Only he knew that would never be possible.
John H. Watson was not a man to run or to shirk his duty.
So he took aim, fired a single shot, and watched through the two sets of windows as the body fell to the ground.
Kill shot, right through the back. Instantaneous.
Less than a second later, he fired another round.
And just as he’d been instructed, he killed the cabbie, too.
—Done. Both at once. No witnesses. – JW
—Oh, you ARE good, aren’t you, Johnny Boy? – JM
Gaaaaaaaaah, there goes valeria again, ripping hearts apart like scrap paper.
It just tears me up, the thought of these two alone. Always has. Sherlock and John, Holmes and Watson, they’re meant to be together—and I don’t know whether that’s through something in the stories so much as it is the power of literary destiny, but that’s how it is for me anyway. Alone, they’re each only half of a story, which is as heartbreaking a thing as there can be in the world. An incomplete story that can’t be told.
That’s why Watson leaving to marry Mary crushes me just as much as Reichenbach. Especially the idea of John leaving to marry her after Reichenbach, because then he doesn’t have a reason to come back. (Also, honestly why introduce a story element like that when you’ve only got three 90 minute stories and you’re not going to have room to DO anything real with it?)
I’m sincerely hoping that ‘wedding’ refers to Sherlock’s engagement during the Case of Charles Augustus Milverton. For numerous reasons.