A/N: For the love of all that is good, I am on one darn AU roll. And a Sherlolly roll at that. I blame Tumblr. So this is a Les Misérables!AU. With plenty of Sherlolly. This occurs in 1847, exactly fifteen years after the June Rebellion. The first part is a flashback. With some French terms. (Because I do my research and I have actually read Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and seen the musical adaptation of the same name.) And it's slightly tweaked musical!verse, just so you know. I shamelessly borrowed from the actual musical. I own nothing.

Some people have the ability to do multiple things at the same time.

Unfortunately, Sherlock Holmes, student revolutionary, defender of the rue de la Chanvrerie barricade and member of Le Amis de l'ABC*, does not have this characteristic.

He is standing near the barricade that Le Amis de l'ABC have built across the road. Chairs, tables, furniture have been shoved into the makeshift barricade.

He is supposed to be on alert for the French army, ready to defend his friends. The spy Moran has just been captured by Le Amis de l'ABC and has been carried off to who knows where.

Indeed, he is torn three ways between:

-Thinking about watching for the French army from his post upon the barricade

-Thinking about love

-Thinking about trying to stop thinking about love

The truth of the matter is, he has fallen deeply in love with a woman he has only met a few times: the extremely beautiful, extremely guarded, and extremely clever Irene Adler. He had run into her once, and with that encounter he had instantly fallen in love. He had even convinced one of his friends, Molly Hooper, to take him to meet Irene at her father's house. Even though his falling in love had earned him the general ridicule and merrymaking of his fellow students, he couldn't help but think of the woman's face wherever he turned. He is a generally aloof and cold man...well, at least he was. He has even sent a letter to her through Molly's capable, street-knowing hands, trying to reach out to his love for what could possibly be the last time.

Unfortunately, with all his thinking, he has gotten distracted.

The first shots have begun to ring out as soldiers try to take the barricade.

Against Donovan's will, Anderson has already sprinted into battle, the drunk idiot that he is, and nearly gets shot.

"No!" Donovan cries out, pulling Anderson back. "We must die together!"

The battle continues on, Sherlock diving out of the way whenever he can and trying to fire at the soldiers whenever he can.

Suddenly, he notices a familiar face join the battle.

"There's a boy climbing the barricade!" yells John. Sherlock whipped his head around, ducked underneath some fire, and came face-to-face with a very ashen, trembling Molly.

Tears are streaking down her soot-covered face, her brown eyes the only recognizable hallmark on the face Sherlock has known for years.

"Good God," he gasps, "what are you doing? Molly, have you no fear?" Then his mind turns to the letter he had asked her to deliver. "Have you seen my beloved? Why have you come back here?!"

She is breathing faster now, her eyelids fluttering. "Took the letter...like you said. I met her father...at the door." Her breath was coming in short, ragged gasps. Sherlock narrowed his eyes, trying to see what is wrong with her. "He said…" Here she tries to take a deep breath, but coughs instead. "He said he would give it." She begins to wobble. "Don't think I can stand anymore!" She exclaims in one labored breath, her knees giving way. Sherlock catches her as she collapses and gently lowers her to the ground, letting her head fall onto his knees. Le Amis de l'ABC is beginning to gather around them both now. The fire has somewhat ceased.

Sherlock frantically begins to examine his friend. "Molly, what's wrong?" He mutters as he feels her face. "There's something wet upon your hair…" He raises his hand and his heart very nearly stops as he stares at the crimson on his hand.

It is blood.

"Molly, you're hurt!" Sherlock exclaims, his voice wavering, and he instantly hates himself for it. Sentiment has made him a wobbly person indeed. "You need some help," he continues urgently. Her blood is slowly spreading. "Oh, God!" He exclaims, his pulse a frantic staccato as he gazes at his friend. "It's everywhere!"

He tries to clean her face with a rag offered by one of Le Amis de l'ABC and slowly, her face becomes the familiar one he knows. Sherlock gently pulls her gray cap out of her hand and tries to staunch the bleeding from her head. The reddish-brown hair around the wound is steadily growing darker, and after a few minutes of trying to stop the bleeding, it is easy to tell that there is nothing he can do.

He still busies himself trying to make her as comfortable as he can, trying to distract both himself and Molly from the inevitable. Finally, her haunting brown eyes, already halfway in another world, meet his. "Don't you fret, M'sieur Sherlock," she murmurs, mouth beginning to stretch in a dreamy smile. "I don't feel any pain."

Sherlock stops whatever useless distraction he is doing and stares at his friend. She coughs a little bit, blood running from the corner of her mouth. Sherlock's heart wrenches. This girl, one of his closest friends, is one of the most hardy girls in Paris: no, in all of France. She does not belong here, lying on the ground of the barricade, dying.

"A little fall of rain," she continues, almost in a sing-song voice, "can hardly hurt me now." She tries to grab hold of his shirt sleeve, but she is growing weaker by the minute. "You're here, that's all I need to know." Her eyes grow panicked as her body begins to shut itself down, and Sherlock slowly shushes her to keep her calm. She continues anyway, for him, despite the pain it must cause her. "And you will keep me safe...and you will keep me close. And rain…" Her body seizes up. Sherlock tightens his grip on Molly as she coughs weakly. "Rain...will make the flowers grow," she finishes.

Sherlock tries to deny the inevitable. "But you will live," he insists. "Molly - dear God above! If I could close your wounds with words of...love." As he says the last word, he feels his heart drop that he has forgotten the feelings of his friend in the shadow of his new love towards Irene. Guilt settles over him, a gloomy, colourless cloud which is filled with a different type of rain.

Not drops of love, like the one she speaks of in her final moments.

No, these are storms of shame, pouring heavily on his conscience.

"Just hold me now," Molly pleads from below him. "And let...let it be. Shelter me," she continues in anguish. "Comfort me…"

"You would live a hundred years," he insists again. "If I could show you how! I won't desert you now," he promises her.

Molly tries to shake her head, the dreamy smile quite disappearing from her face. But the action is still too much for her, and she whimpers in pain. Instead, she settles for words. "The rain can't hurt me now...the rain…" She coughs again. "The rain will wash away what's past! And you...you will keep me safe...and you will keep me close. I'll sleep in your embrace at last!"

She already seems to have one foot in another reality, her chest clad in men's clothes heaving at the effort of leaving this world. "The rain that...brings you here is Heaven-blessed!" The dreamy smile returns to her face, and her eyes take on a new sense of wonder and joy, as if she can see things that nobody else can. "The skies begin to clear, and I'm at rest," she continues deliriously. "A breath away from where you are, I've come home from...so far!" Blood trickles from her mouth again, and Sherlock wipes it away gently. "So, don't you fret, M'sieur Sherlock. I...don't feel any pain," she repeated, her body slowly shutting down as she spoke. "A little fall of rain...can hardly hurt me now."

She sounds content, and Sherlock is filled with regret that she cannot be more content with the friend she has: the friend who was so blind that he didn't notice that she had feelings for him. At least, not until he sent her to fetch another girl.

"That's all I need to know." She continues, her breath becoming more hitched by the second. "And you will keep me safe, and you will keep me close."

Sherlock knows that the end is very near. The moment stretches out.

"Hush-a-bye, my dear Molly," he whispers. He knows this is what she needs to hear in her final moments. "You won't feel any pain," he asserts. "A little...fall...of rain can hardly hurt you now. I'm here. I will stay with you…'til you are sleeping."

If possible, her smile grows wider, even though it is obvious that it causes her pain. "And rain…" she whispers.

"And rain," Sherlock replies quietly.

"Will make...the flowers…"

"Will make the flowers…"

Sherlock waits for her to finish.

But Molly Hooper is already dead, eyes seeing things that nobody else can, a contemplative smile crossing her face.

"Grow…" he finishes for her and bows his head over his friend's body.

Molly is eventually carried away by his friends, and Sherlock can only stagger to his feet and launch himself back into battle: for freedom, for Irene...for Molly.

Sherlock's hand tightened on the gate to the cemetery as the memories from that June day swirled in his mind. He was thirty-five now. It had been almost fifteen years to the day of Molly's death. And two years to the day of Irene's departure to the United States.

Sherlock Holmes was alone in the world.

The bourgeois** he knew simply referred to him as "the last revolutionary." Indeed, all of Les Amis de l'ABC, barring him, had either been killed in battle or executed afterwards, like Donovan and Anderson, who had died clasping hands before a firing squad. Even young Archie had been killed as he tried to retrieve cartridges from dead French soldiers.

Irene had left him two years ago. As she had explained to him in a letter he had found on the bed, her free-spirited soul had gotten tired of France. Sherlock only made it to the port to see her off before she had left him forever.

Thinking about his past only made him think of the friends that he had left behind.

Sherlock pushed the gate open with a shake of his head. There was one gravesite he wanted to visit, and he had something to say.

As he walked among the graves, he noticed a man standing near Molly's grave. His breath caught in his throat. He had precisely the same reddish-brown shade of hair as Molly, a shade Sherlock had not seen for fifteen years. He shook his head again and kept walking towards the tree that shaded Molly's tombstone.

By the time he reached the grave, the man he had seen earlier had turned around. He walked near Sherlock as he passed him to find another grave.

Sherlock got a chance to look closer at the other man's face. He looked somewhat familiar, but the brown mustache on the man's upper lip was definitely not something he remembered from anyone he knew. The other man looked like he was trying not to stare at Sherlock. But stare he did, and the two men stood at a stalemate on the path.

Sherlock inspected the other man. He was short and wiry, his hands scarred and worn from extensive work. His face was, indeed, slightly familiar and slightly feminine at the same time, but Sherlock couldn't place where he could have seen this stranger.

"Have we met?" He asked the shorter man finally.

"No, I don't think so," the Englishman replied. His voice was oddly deep, with evidence of him being in England for a length of time. "Good day." He turned and walked off. As Sherlock gazed after the man, he noticed him walking with a limp. Shaking his head, Sherlock continued on towards Molly's grave.

He slowly approached the plain black headstone. The only inscriptions on it, the inscriptions that he himself had commissioned, still shone brightly after fifteen years.

Marie Hooper
1812 - 1832
Resurgam***

He exhaled softly as he thought of one of the final services he had done for the friend that he had lost. He had made the carver carve Molly's real name onto the stone, having wheedled it out of her parents in a long and painful conversation. However, he wasn't sure about why the Resurgam was there; he'd never asked for it. It was a nice touch, though, he had to admit.

Pain raced through him as he remembered that Molly had not lived long enough to finish her own sentence.

Slowly, he laid a hand on the gravestone. It was smooth to the touch, and comforting for what he knew he had to say. For what he knew he must say, after fifteen years of merely contemplative silence and occasionally a bouquet of flowers.

"Hello, Molly," he began cautiously. "If you do not know who I am...I am Sherlock Holmes. I was there when you died fifteen years ago." He gulped. "You died on my lap, actually. I remember it like it was yesterday. You never even lived long enough to finish talking about making the flowers grow after the rain. I never realized how intelligent you were. How energetic, poetic, witty, stellar you were. I even fancy you were one of the stars, and that because you were a star, you could not stay long on this earth." Silently, he cursed himself for being so flowery.

He stepped back to address the stone directly. "Do you know, Molly. That woman I asked you to take me to? Irene? Well, after the rebellion, we married. And we were happy, Molly. I was. And she was too, but not for long." His face darkened. "Thirteen years in, she grew tired of me. She left. I suppose she was telling the truth. She was rather a free spirit."
Sherlock felt a little bit wary at spilling out his feelings in a public area, but the man he had found on the path had probably gone, and there was nobody else in the cemetery.

"And I suppose she left because she realized something I hadn't realized at all until she left and I was left alone again," he continued.

"She realized who my heart really lay with...a woman buried six feet underground, whose gravestone I had even commissioned." He cleared his throat.

"You, Molly Hooper. It's been you, it's always been you, and I feel incredibly stupid to have realized...too late…that the one who truly had my heart was the one in front of me all along. You realized, the smart woman you are. You knew. I concede it: your intellect surpassed mine at that point! And you reacted accordingly. But I was blind, Molly! I noticed your feelings towards me, but I ignored it, and that just makes me as blind as a bat. And now, I've realized, all too late, that you were always the one who had my heart! I just…" He looked to the side, his eyes beginning to smart.

"I just wish that you were alive to hear that."

Suddenly, he heard a soft, strangled, definitely feminine...sob from directly behind him. He paused, face slowly growing warmer in embarrassment, before he whirled around to confront the intruder, an angry rebuke ready on his lips…

But what he saw made him take back anything that he was about to say.

Please don't kill me. Just...please.

And now, a few terms that I have included in this piece, defined here if you needed it.

* Les Amis de l'ABC: French for "Friends of the ABC". "ABC" is a pun for the French word abaissé (lowly, oppressed), which is pronounced as "abese", very similar to "A-B-C". Victor Hugo's fictional association of revolutionary French republican students featured in his novel Les Misérables. (I told you I did my research.)
**bourgeois: the middle class
***Resurgam: Latin for "I shall rise again." Borrowed from Charlotte Brontë's work Jane Eyre (which, by the way, is another one of my very favorite books).