#misssherlock

Audience: I don't think Sherlock will survive.

: Me too, she have no reason to be alive, the morikawa case is solved.

Watolock shippers: Wrong! She will come back for us!

Wato: She will come back for me..

A/N: I’m setting up an AO3 account so I’d probably be posting this story again some time soon. In the meantime, please enjoy the first chapter of this fanfic which I intend to be rather long if the gods of fanfics permit me.

Summary: Taking place right after the infamous Reichenbach fall, Sherlock has to dive into a mysterious clandestine investigation with the help of Wato and the police department. Battling the hardships of keeping her living status a secret to the public, Sherlock is forced to work alongside a woman whose intelligence and flamboyance mirrors that of Sherlock’s—the amusing Irina Arata. Is cooperation a choice between the two? How will Sherlock cope with the thought of hurting Wato again? And how will Wato place her trust in anyone whilst she struggles with her inner demons?

Yes, I’m adapting Irene Adler. Yes, there will be WatoLock.

Chapter 1: “Sherlock”

A momentary waft of a familiar scent startled Wato out of her hollow daydream.

She had been staring for god knew how long at the soft ripples of the river, which traversed under her nose and under the coat she wound tightly around her arms. The coat donned a colour that bordered between emerald and lime. Wato had always found it a little too striking for anyone in Tokyo to wear it out on the streets. But, if anyone were to have been bold enough to take that dare, and silently proclaim themselves different in this noiseless world, it would have been someone that Wato knew for a period too short to be content.

Wato shuddered at the thought of her name.

Sherlock.

Tears struggled to roll out of her puffy eyes. How long has it been, since she had tugged on to this coat, to whatever she had left of Sherlock? How long has it been, since she witnessed Sherlock’s lithe figure leaping out and thudding hard unto the distant ground?

It felt like hours and yet, years; emotions empty and yet, spilling uncontrollably.

She turned to the left, to where the air had teased that familiar scent of lavenders and roses, when her heart suddenly skipped a beat.

It was a woman, in tweed trousers and a brown coat that fluttered violently in the unceasing breeze. She walked towards Wato in a figure that proved to be too nimble for Wato to think that it was any ordinary person in this city. Blinking hot tears away, Wato found herself taking a few staggering steps to this woman and halting altogether when she discovered that her vision had truly failed her.

It wasn’t Sherlock.

Her face was a soft oval, with long jet-black hair loosely tied to the side. Round spectacles framed her kind eyes and sat comfortably on a wide nose.

Wato stared at her for good measure before quickly averting her gaze to the river when the woman shot a suspicious glare at the poor doctor.

What was she thinking? Of course, it couldn’t be Sherlock.

“This is what we call…” a soft voice popped in Wato’s head—whispers of the vile Irikawa-sensei. “Anomalous hallucinations. As benign as they are, they can be… common after traumatic experiences and a prodrome to future stress disorders—“

“Shut up,” Wato whispered under hitched breath. “Please. Just this once,”

Tears running down her face, Wato paced towards the train station that stood ten minutes away from the bridge, which began to be blanketed by a shadow of the sunset.

She turned to the right into a path by the river that was lined by naked cherry blossom trees. The sunset was relentless in its radiance and nearly blinded Wato had she not squinted. The sight was breathtakingly beautiful with long and stark shadows painted against the pavement and yet, poignant with the piles of dead leaves that had drifted their way to the ground.

“Breathtakingly beautiful and poignant,” Wato thought. “Just like Sherlock,”

Wato paced even quicker. Every corner her wondering mind took, Sherlock would always be standing there, waiting.

“This has to stop,”

As Wato picked up her pace, she heard crunches of leaves tapping quickly and dying down behind her. Wato paused in her steps, blinking.

“I’m imagining things,” Wato said to herself.

She resumed her brisk walk towards the alley that served as a shortcut to the station. There it was again. The sound of rustling leaves picked up in volume behind her, starting with a few staggering steps before quickly dying down to a tempo that mirrored Wato’s. Someone was masking the sound of their steps by copying Wato’s speed.

“I’m imagining things,” Wato repeated to herself. “Anomalous hallucinations, that’s it,”

The path grew eerily quiet as children and jogging elderlies retreated back to their homes. Wato took a brief look back but to no avail when the sun had been too blinding to anyone’s eyes.

“The train station,” Wato mumbled under heavy pants. “That’s where everyone should be,”

At that reassuring thought, Wato nearly broke into a jog when she turned into the alley. For a split second, she could hear quickening stomps on leaves turn to echoes of hard trudges against the tar road of the alley. She felt her heart thumping against her ribcage. The train station, she needed to get there as fast as she could.

Now that the Sun was blocked by the two towering shop lots on either side of alley, Wato bravely took a peep over her shoulder to see who was tailing her.

A shudder ran down her spine.

There were two of them.

A man with ruffled hair, a mask over his face and an oversized romper jacket tailed her a good five meters away. His eyes pierced through Wato’s. The second was a rather lanky one with a mask, long coat and a beanie over their head. This one tailed Wato even further than the first, with an aura so faint that Wato nearly mistook him for a shadow.

Jogging, Wato kept her calm whilst she dialed Inspector Reimon’s number and left three missed calls—a signal they had agreed upon if any one of them felt like they were in danger and were in dire need of help. Inspector Reimon had been kind enough to warn her that not all members of the Dock had been apprehended and quite a few who had been suspected of involvement with the Dock had yet to be discovered. It seemed that at the urgent notice of Irikawa-sensei’s death, they had scrambled out of their headquarters, grabbing every piece of work they had parceled over the months. Many were arrested with whatever devices they had confiscated, but many remain at large.

Was this man one of them? Are they plotting revenge against Wato?

Or was this one of those journalists that couldn’t follow etiquette and decided that stalking Wato for intel was better than asking her good-manneredly?

Wato ran down the steps of the station, nearly stumbling upon the tiled staircase. She had planned her speed all along so that she could hop on the train just in time before her stalker did.

But soon she realized that she arrived to an empty platform with a strong wind running across the columns of the station. She was seconds too late.

“Toden-Arakawa Line to arrive in 4 minutes,” a voice announced.

Wato nearly choked on her own gasp.

She turned to her left, to see a dead end and a small stair to the tracks. To her right, she found a distant flight of stairs. She bolted.

Not five steps into her sprint, a violent pull on her hair flipped her world upside down and the next thing she knew, she had knocked herself hard on the tiled floor and was looking at what seemed to be the eyes of a murderer. He loomed about six feet over Wato. Even behind the white surgical mask, Wato could see the glint of an ecstatic smile in his fervent gaze.

He whipped out a knife out of the pocket of his jacket. Without a second to spare, he slowly lowered the knife down with one hand inches away from Wato’s neck when in some miraculous feat, a small figure lunged into him, pushing him into the tracks.

Thumping and clanking hard against the stones that lined the solid metal tracks, his angry groans permeated the quiet station.

It was the second stalker.

He took his friend by surprise, even Wato. His gangly body stood back up with wobbly knees, before grabbing Wato by the arm and helping her jump to her feet. Wato took the yank willingly, as in her periphery she saw the first stalker climbing up slowly with a bloody nose and vehement eyes. Now that she had a clearer view of the helpful second stalker, she felt as if she vaguely recalled a quiet young member of the Dock in the kitchens that shared the same physique. Though, the soft wave of brown hair that jutted out of his beanie could only mean to Wato that he had probably altered his appearance since their first encounter.

The young man nearly clawed his fingers into Wato’s wrist through her coat whilst he desperately led Wato to the right end of the platform. As Wato dashed across with him, she heard loud and quickening stomps approaching behind them. Before long, the grip on her wrist was no more and the young man had pounced the first stalker again. This time, in his trembling grips was a pocketknife with an intricate design, which he used to firmly stab the right wrist of the first stalker.

The towering man screamed in agony, sending his knife scattering to the floor behind him.

Wato’s strides only grew longer as she felt brushing against her cheeks the fresh air that came rushing down from the staircase on the other end. She pondered whether it was against her morals to be fleeing away from a scene without offering much help for the small man.

Suddenly, in some extraordinary bewilderment, the fire shutter rolled down before the gates and as Wato neared two feet to the exit, her path had been blocked. She stared, with heavy breaths and a shocked expression.

“What on earth?”

Her strides slowed down when a second cry of pain broke the eerie silence—a different one, which had Wato stop dead in her tracks.

It was a woman’s voice.

Wato turned around, perplexed. A civilian? A witness?

Now a good twenty meters away, Wato saw, in the grasps of the burly man was the collar of the second stalker’s coat. With the mask snatched away and the beanie thrown off to the side of the wall, clear as day, was a woman with short dark hair, tainted by the crimson blood that came dripping profusely from her left temple. She moaned between fearful weeps and jagged breath, clawing her way out of the man’s solid clench.

Wato blinked.

It was a woman, one that Wato didn’t recognize from the Dock and one that even the first stalker was not acquainted with, judging from his look of bemusement. Yet, something about her presence striked a resemblance to a person Wato once knew.

When Wato braved herself to witness yet another a murder right before her eyes, she was instead given a peculiar sight. The man had let go of the woman’s collar with a look of utter disbelief as her head seemed to limply thud onto the ground. Breathing heavily, she turned to the side and covered her face with trembling hands that had been painted with her own blood.

In a moment of hesitation, Wato had wanted to approach the woman when a sturdy hand gripped her left shoulder. Wato startled to the side, confused to see none other than Kento standing beside her with an expression of some forlorn wrath. Opening her mouth to speak, her words were cut off by the sound of rushing footsteps that came down through the other staircase. In seconds, Inspector Reimon and Sergeant Shibata came desperately running towards the stalkers. With the crook of his elbow and some surprising agility, Shibata yanked the man away by his neck, injecting distance between him and the woman, who now seemingly laid with only half a life and barely any movement. In a smooth sweep, the man’s arms were brought to the back and handcuffed along with the pocketknife still jutting out of his wrist.

Whimpering, his broad physique seemed to try and wriggle out of Inspector Reimon’s and Shibata’s tough grasps.

“I–“ The man yelled. “I thought she was DEAD!”

His shout bounced off the walls with a prolonged pause.

Inspector Reimon’s eyes widened as they trailed to find Wato.

Lightly tapping Wato’s back, as though to give her some warm encouragement, Kento quickly approached the woman with flighty steps.

Wato felt her lungs losing air, and her heart collapsing upon itself. “No…. It can’t be,”

Crouching beside her, Kento took the woman by her back and slowly propped her up with one arm. Her head whipped back against the bend of his elbow, now facing Wato clearly upside down with her hair flicked to the side.

With comedic synchrony, the sight of the woman’s head having done so had imbibed some concern in Reimon and Shibata, washing their faces with a strained expression. Just as Inspector Reimon was about to go over to the breathless doctor, Wato broke into a sprint towards the woman and Reimon visibly hesitated to stop her from doing just that.

Now just a few feet away, dropping to her knees, Wato saw the face of a familiar friend of hers, apparently unconscious with the last beads of tears streaming down the side of her face.

A whisper.