Welcome to Baker Street

111. Eat your heart out

Giulia raises her watery eyes on Sherlock and smiles at him faintly through the tears. She wishes she could express how infinitely grateful she is to him, to both of them, but the words are failing her now.

Sherlock reads the weariness in her eyes and instinctively stretches out a hand.

"How about we get out of here? I'm not particularly fond of this room." He grimaces, stealing a glance around.

She nods and latches her hand to his, letting him guide her towards the exit door as John precedes them out of the room.

While John painfully limps his way through a maintenance passageway a few steps ahead, Giulia asks Sherlock, "Regardless of the end result, when I had to choose what to do... Do you think I should have let him die?"

No pain or regret in her voice, just candid curiosity. She couldn't ask the question then, so she's asking it now.

"I don't think he was worth changing your system of beliefs and core values for."

Giulia glances at him and reads between the lines of his honest and diplomatic answer. "But you wanted to kill him."

"Absolutely and without hesitation. For what he did to you."

She sighs and the heartache that she had to quash when she first learned of Thomas's betrayal spreads through her chest, morphing into blind, pointless anger.

"I still can't believe he betrayed me. He used to mean the world to me, and in his twisted revenge for my rejection, he decided to wreck my new life. Oh, I was so stupid! I felt so guilty after I turned him down. For days while I was adjusting to my crazy life in Baker Street, I kept thinking about him, feeling sorry for him. And he was already conniving with my greatest enemy. I feel like an idiot."

"You can't blame yourself," Sherlock rationally objects.

"I just wish I'd seen it coming, but I could've never imagined he would do such a thing to me. We were very close."

He cocks a brow just for a second. "I gathered."

They keep walking silently along another corridor, and then Giulia asks, "How do I recover from this?"

"Just like you've done every single time before: by fighting your way out with fierce determination and a healthy dose of trust issues."

She bends her lips in a sour smile. "As if I needed any more reasons to be a damaged human being."

Sherlock stops dead in the corridor, heedless of Moriarty's henchmen waiting for them at every intersection. He fixes his gaze on her eyes.

"You're not damaged, Giulia. You're a survivor. I don't even know where you find the strength to keep going through this game right now, after everything you've just discovered about your previous life." For once, he doesn't hide his admiration. His voice lowers to a whisper, "By the way, I'm sincerely sorry for the way you had to find out about your family's fate and the plot at the Consulate."

She squeezes his hand, blushing slightly under the dim lights of the passage—she had almost forgotten their fingers were still interlocked, it just feels so natural.

"Thanks, but despite it being utterly heartwrenching, I do think this was the only way I could bear to learn the truth. It was better to hear it all from Moriarty's mouth—the perpetrator, than read about his involvement in my family's tragedy in an MI6 report. I embarked on the investigation because I wanted to find out the truth behind the attack at the Consulate and now I have it. I've had the final confirmation that my father was always the designated victim and I just became an additional problem to get rid of. Moriarty plotted to dispose of both of us in one go: killing two birds with one stone."