holmes_minor | "Rose Mary" (221b, Rated G, Holmes Minor Monthly Prompt for May 2017) (Reply)

Title: Rose Mary
Author: gardnerhill
Form/Wordcount: 221b
Characters/Pairings: Mary Watson, John Watson, Sherlock Holmes
Rating: G
Warning: None
Summary: That’s for remembrance.
Author's Notes: For the May 2017 Holmes Minor Monthly Prompt, “Flowers.” A vignette in my Oubliette series.

She had carried pink roses to the altar, a modest half-dozen which had still put a crimp in his meagre savings; their petals had been a poor imitation of the rosy blush on her cheeks.

When she had become ill he had spent far too much money to buy red roses in January. She had managed a smile through the pain as he’d vowed to obtain the same for Valentine’s Day that year.

White roses had adorned her still chest in the coffin, their petals a warmer tone than the bleached folds of the dress and her colourless face and the leaden snow of the churchyard. He had bought her red roses a month later anyway – he hardly noticed the change to the grocer’s accounts, he wasn’t eating much those days anyway – and some part of him was icily grateful that here, at least, was a known burial spot for one of his loved ones that he could visit and adorn.

In August he came, burnt brown from the Aquitaine sun. Pink and red and white together, roses filled his hands and brightened her stone as he laid them beneath her name.

And the man who had not died after all knelt down to lay his own bouquet of yellow roses alongside the ones laid by her widower and his beloved.