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acdholmesfestTitle: Present, Tense
Recipient:methylviolet10b
Author: [redacted]
Rating: G
Characters, including any pairing(s): Holmes/Watson
Warnings: Angst with a happy ending
Summary: In the early days after Holmes' return from his hiatus and death itself, Watson tries to settle back into Baker Street and determine what of them is different now and what remains the same.
I was a good sleeper once. I remembered those days clearly. When necessary, I slept soundly on rolling ships, in active battlefield surgeries, and in the midst of tropical monsoons. Later I discovered myself able to find rest amid the most savage violin torture, crammed in hiding inside a linen closet, or curled on a hay pile across from a giraffe in the barn of a forger. When I truly needed it, sleep was within my reach.
That was all before, of course. It had been years since I rested that easily. Now I often felt as if I was conducting a séance every night in my bedroom. Rituals were orchestrated, all the scene set just as the spirits demanded. I took my place and held out for a sign. More often than not, the result was the same as any attempt to contact a ghost, a long stretch of time waiting expectantly in the dark for something fleeting and miraculous, never to arrive.
I thought it might be different now. I had not only met a ghost, I was living in that ghost's upstairs bedroom again, by this time for almost a week. Sherlock Holmes had returned to London and life and me without warning and the world seemed fully upside down.
If we did not exit those old sitting room walls, I could almost pretend no time had passed as long as I ignored his new grey hairs as well as my own. Holmes never pursued Moriarty. He never allowed me to be lured away from him. He never left me a hastily scrawled letter and a weight in my heart I had borne since that day.
Outside, amazed eyes everywhere we went shattered the illusion. Sherlock Holmes was a walking miracle. It is not everyday that one sees the resurrected striding through the city in full casual nonchalance. A bit of his magic even rubbed off onto me, as if I had somehow been the medium that returned him to our living reality. In those first days, a strange disbelieving reverence followed the two of us about. News of Holmes was on the front page of every newspaper in the nation. Passers-by whispered to each other on the street, trying not to get caught pointing as I walked to the tobacconist and back.
Holmes had encouraged me to come to stay with him as early as that very first evening after Sebastian Moran nearly finished the job James Moriarty failed at all those years prior. This time, to my fortune, I was at his side to peel the villain's fingers away from Holmes' throat. We walked away together back across the street to our old rooms as if we were walking back in time. Back into a lost life, found perfectly preserved.
Our sitting room could have been a Sherlock Holmes museum. The only thing removed from it was dust. The palimpsest that he'd been studying was still laid open on his desk. His jackknife stood proudly lodged into the mantlepiece, holding up a small messy stack of yellowing telegrams for his attention. All that he'd left behind was waiting for him, exactly where he left it.
I, however, had moved my life out to other, less painful digs after I returned from the Continent and he did not. There was no John Watson museum to find now on my return. My heavy old desk I had left, so it was waiting for me with fresh paper and even my preferred brand of ink. But every book was missing, every letter gone from its slot. A comfortable new bed stood proudly next to an empty wardrobe. Mrs. Hudson's fresh handmade soap sat waiting and fragrant by the basin along with plenty of towels and water, but my razor was waiting for me uselessly on the other side of the city.
In a few days time, my things gradually were restored to their former places, as was I. New clashed against old. In the small hours, I laid in the soft featherbed and wondered who bought it and when. I wondered how long this room had been standing ready and waiting for my – for his – return. I wondered a great many things lying alone there in the dark.
That night, I readjusted myself for the likely fiftieth time and curled the comforter around me. Baker Street was not meant to be this quiet. Holmes only played his Stradivarius on our first night back, but he did it with a devout reverence, savoring its exquisite sound so long-missed. He had no desire yet to punish it for his boredom and certainly no need. We were swamped with work. Pent up demand for the greatest detective the world had ever known left him with his selection of mysteries from a sumptuous buffet. He picked and chose and our days were filled with problems and solutions. I adored every second of it, even if I continuously felt as if I had to be dreaming. Perhaps that is why I still found it so hard to fall asleep at the end of each day. Part of me believed it might wake me back up again.
As I wriggled my good shoulder into the pillow once more and tried to sink into at least some semblance of twilight, I heard a sound I had almost forgotten. My doorknob turned, although I did not hear the familiar click of the latch that used to precede Holmes bursting in with news and plans and absolutely no decorum whatsoever.
I opened my eyes. A slit in the curtains cast a narrow shaft of moonlight onto the door. It remained shut, motionless, but I could not be. I pushed my blankets aside to stand. Abruptly, the knob rattled again, and footsteps paddled away at a clip.
Holmes was already halfway down the stairs by the time I opened the door, as swift as he had ever been on his lean grasshopper legs. On hearing his name, he turned around casually, leaning onto the railing.
"Watson! I am surprised to see you up at such an uncivilized hour. I was off on my way toward dreamland myself."
"You woke me," I said, approximating the truth.
"Ah, yes. You have my apologies. Shall not happen again."
"Wait, what did you want?"
I reached for him and caught his wrist along with an idea of what he had come to me for.
"Holmes, you are as hot as a lit match. You are ill?"
"No, in no real sense am I ill. I thank you, Doctor, I shall leave you be."
My grip on him did not slip as he tried to pull away. Holmes relented, but he did not quite meet my eyes.
"As I said, I am perfectly hale, but, as it happens, I may be experiencing a mild... an almost certainly very mild overdose of cocaine."
"What? Why did you not simply tell me that?" I asked as I dragged him back toward my medical bag and the nearest bed, my own.
"Well, I am aware of your negative feelings regarding this particular proclivity, Watson. If possible, I had hoped not to involve you at all."
"So you came to my door in the middle of the night."
"No, I changed my mind at your door in the middle of the night. There, I arrived at the proper realization that your professional efforts were entirely unnecessary as my anxiety about my various symptoms was merely one of the symptoms itself."
"That does not make those symptoms any less hazardous. What are you feeling? Here, take this thermometer."
"Do you wish to hear my complaints, Doctor, or would you prefer to ascertain my temperature? I do not believe both are simultaneously possible in the physical sense. I suppose if you were willing to sacrifice some precision in measurement and also able to accurately interpret my racing words from behind pursed lips and clenched teeth, you might–"
"Temperature," I said. "And lie back."
If he was able to be this talkative, I was relatively certain he would be well. In my experience, dying men tended not to be quite so droll. Still, a hard pit of worry sat in my stomach. At least Holmes was easier to examine with his mouth shut.
His self-diagnosis seemed correct by all observations. Heightened blood pressure, a fine tremor, pupils wide and black. A mild overdose of cocaine it was.
Holmes was right about another thing as well. As I pulled the thermometer with its unnaturally long quicksilver line from under his tongue, I was indeed experiencing some negative feelings regarding his behaviour.
"You'll survive for another elective misadventure, Holmes. You can relax."
"Hmm, in theory, perhaps, but I am not of the belief that relaxation is in my range of capabilities at the moment. Would you settle for turbulent in place of tranquil? How about electrified? I feel as if I should be running or climbing a tree."
His hands grasped in the air at imagined limbs. I pushed them back down.
"You'll do nothing more than lie still."
He obeyed as best he could, which was little. As I fished through my bag to fill a syringe, he squirmed in place and watched me.
"You're wrong, you know," he said. "I did stop. For years I have had not a single drop. That abstinence was not initially of my own volition, I will admit. A clean and reliable supply of my vice became impossible to source while changing cities and faces every few days. I gave it up all at once in one long week at a remote country inn outside Bratislava."
"All at once? The withdrawal must have been a misery. Why would you start again after all that?"
For the first time, Holmes did not have an immediate response.
"I came upon an old kit of mine here tonight," he said at last. "My emergency supply, long ago secreted away and more recently forgotten about entirely. It was hidden in my best acorn hole after all this time, the hollow space I created in the leg of my headboard. I suppose you and Mrs. Hudson never found it."
"We never looked for it. Try to relax yourself now."
A single fresh puncture wound sat red and angry in the crook of his elbow. My needle made a twin for it in a nest of long healed scars. I left to fetch him some cool water to drink and myself some space to breathe. Holmes was quieter when I returned.
"Any better?"
"My chest no longer feels so tight as to possibly implode at any given moment and my thoughts are not coming at me in a cyclonic chaos, so yes, Doctor, I would unreservedly agree with better."
"You used your old dose, didn't you? Your tolerance has dropped."
"Yes, I did notice that. And not just mine, I think."
I sighed and settled into the new too-small chair beside my bed. Any distant hope of sleep tonight had vanished.
Holmes drank the water I gave him and submitted to a cold compress without complaint. He was silent and still for a long time. Then all at once, he held out his clenched fist to me.
"You deserve a better explanation, I know. Sometimes the only explanation one has to offer is evidence."
With reluctance, he uncurled his long fingers to reveal a plain silver pocket watch. How he had produced it from seeming thin air was the magician's flair that I remembered.
The watch was scuffed and badly worn. It was not until I had it in my own hands that I recognized it.
This was mine, my old pocket watch, a gift Holmes had given me after our first extraordinarily lucrative case resolved so long ago, the delicate recovery of the McCarver pearls. I almost missed his grand resolution with the baroness and the barber's scissors by missing a train in Hertfordshire.
"A good partner should have a reliable timepiece to arrive promptly when he is needed," he said as he handed it to me a week later with no pomp but a wry spark in his eye. I told him I was honoured, and I was.
He had never called me his partner before.
Now it looked as if my watch had lived a dozen lives in the time I had missed it. Scratches in the case caught the glint of the light. Small dings left the metal pockmarked. It was filed bare of the fine engraving of my initials it had once worn.
"How on earth did you get this? You had it all this time? I thought I'd lost it."
"As you were meant to. I pickpocketed it off of you on the road from Strasburg."
"But why would you steal my watch? I would have simply given it to you if I'd only known you had use for it."
"Of course you would have, which is why I had to steal it. It isn't as if I needed it, except that I did, more than I could even then know. Observe and deduce, Watson. I know you remember my methods."
He closed his eyes and pretended to rest.
So this was his explanation somehow, of something, this hunk of tarnished silver sitting heavy in my palm. Holmes clearly had no interest in elaborating himself. That was for the best for now, I thought. Perhaps the sedative I had administered would pull him down into a real, recovering sleep as he playacted at a fake one. I settled in for the wait either way and turned my new, old toy toward the candlelight.
I was meant to understand something from this small device he'd given to and taken from me, perhaps a good many things. If the object of a crime belonged to anyone else, Holmes would be eager to tell me about it at length, following the relentless cascade of detail and logic down to its inevitable source. But this evidence was mine, the theft his, and the meaning behind any of it confused to missing, at least to me.
Observe and deduce, Watson. I know you remember my methods.
He was right of course, but knowing his methods and applying them to any fruition were always two distinctly different things. I tried to decide what it was he meant for me to see. The condition of the watch? The wear? Upon inspection, it appeared someone had mutilated it with a straight file or some such, haphazardly repolished it, then left it to rattle around freely with coins and keys for a year or maybe three. From the outside, it looked cheap and long used but the actual functioning machinery inside seemed relatively pristine. The crystal had been damaged, yes, but less, and the movements beneath ticked forward crisply.
So Holmes had filed my name off of the case before anything else, and that made easy sense to me. He was running, hiding in foreign lands under falsified identities. A fine silver gentleman's watch was a risk to carry on its own, much less one with my initials engraved upon it. It was a calling card printed plainly for all the wrong eyes to read. I could imagine him sitting in some dingy rented room, hastily carving off the last remnants of anything bearing either of our names.
But why had he even taken it, then? Why go through the trouble of keeping it after he had? What was to be gained by stealing a timepiece he had no real use for by his own admission?
It isn't as if I needed it, except that I did, more than I could even then know.
He said he had taken it from me as we left Strasburg. Many of the various localities we passed through on our flight were unmemorable. Strasburg was impossible to forget.
Holmes did everything he could think of to get me to leave him and return to London the morning after Professor Moriarty slipped his noose. He called himself dangerous now, as if he had ever been anything but, not least to himself. He appealed to my reason, and when that failed, he attempted to insult me away instead. On realizing even his worst was nothing to me, he brought out his best.
"You must understand that Moriarty is less a criminal than an unnatural force of injustice itself, a casual destroyer of lives for the sheer sport and profit of cruelty. If our clash does not end with his undoing, I consign untold hundreds, nay, thousands of souls over the years to misery and death by his will. I am determined to spare as many as I am able. John, you are not merely one of that number. You are the very first."
"If he kills you and walks away free, it will be zero of that number. You need help. You need someone at your back."
"I have no intention of allowing him to walk away free. All the more reason to send you home. I shall not ask you to break your oath, Doctor. What comes next is not something for a healer."
"No, it is something for a soldier. You forget what I have seen, what I have done in my lifetime."
"Never. I know well what war has wrought and still yet wreaks upon you. I will not add to that tally."
Our debate and occasional shouting match went on, but I refused to bend. At last Sherlock Holmes conceded defeat with the drop of his obstinate shoulders.
Or at least he feigned defeat. Is that why he took my watch? To find another way to win? To make me lose track of time, miss another train perhaps, and allow him the space to slip away from me unnoticed?
But if that was the intent, why didn't he follow through with it? A week we trekked through the Rhone valley and the Swiss mountains after that day, with Holmes as filled with energy as he could possibly be and I filled with trepidation. He could have abandoned me easily as I watched behind for our pursuer and not ahead at him. As clever as he is, he could have tricked me and left me behind a dozen times over.
And yet he never did. Day after day and town after town, we arrived and we left together. Only Moriarty himself succeeded at tricking me away from Holmes' side in the end, albeit with his willing consent and cooperation.
That moment I had run through in my mind a thousand times since the day as though I could change the past through sheer force of imagination. As if I could see the moment he chose to send me from the fray and this time find some way to prevent it.
There it was all over again, as fresh and raw as it had ever been.
Holmes peered over me, reading the note in my hands upside down faster than I could read it properly.
I hesitated, questioning the messenger boy on the few details, trying to estimate how long I was likely to be needed. A part of me dimly hoped this consumptive Englishwoman was nearer the end of her suffering than even the letter suggested. I told myself it was mercy. I knew in my heart it was nothing but fear.
Streaks of sun refracted into spectrums in the billowing mist. The falling waters echoed all around us. As it carried over the roil, his voice was calm, fascinated.
"The light here is singularly dramatic, is it not? Perfection in its way. I think I should like to stay a while."
Leaned against the stone, Holmes kept his hand in his pocket and his gaze fixed upon the chasm. His shadow cut trim and black across the footpath between us.
I turned my back to him, on him.
A while became forever.
A tear I'd not intended rolling down my cheek startled me back into the present. I wiped it away with the heel of my hand, grateful to find my patient by now truly asleep and no longer able to bear witness.
In my new bed in my old room, Holmes at last looked at peace. My friend, whose empty coffin I had carried, whose funeral I had endured, whose loss I had mourned with all of my soul, lay relaxed and dozing at my side, breathing softly, breathing at all.
In that moment, everything seemed possible. Everything seemed temporary.
Forever had been, after all.
I left the room to let him sleep. If I stayed, I was certain to end up waking him, and Holmes needed rest now more than anything after the night's near-disaster. The immediate danger for him was passed. Instead, all the risk for him lay in the future, with the sway of the drug over his senses now returned as alive and vibrant as he was.
Downstairs in the sitting room, the air seemed less stifling. I dropped myself into my chair by the fireplace and for some time accosted the smoldering cinders with the poker as if I could interrogate them for answers.
Everything here was Holmes as he had been, a fossilised image of him left trapped exact in amber. Was it who he was still? How much had he changed from the day I left him, the day he left me? Had he changed at all? I tried to imagine what the past meant to a formerly dead man, but I found I did not know what it meant to a formerly grieving man either. Not yet.
Above me, his commonplace books lined perfectly dusted but otherwise long untouched shelves. This was his grand index, crafted meticulously with the names, relationships, and histories for notable criminals and important persons across no fewer than four continents. It was Holmes' finest resource, and now it was surely out of date and untrustworthy. Even his prized mental maps of the city and its environs would have to be recreated en masse. Buildings had been demolished and built in the time he was away. Bridges and roads laid. Restaurants and residents had come and gone and come again. Change was everywhere in our Empire's great capital, and Sherlock Holmes had seen none of it.
"It won't take as long as you think."
I turned to find Holmes leaning in the doorway, looking weary with my own robe dangling limply from his bony shoulders. He was as thin as I'd ever seen him but as adept at interpreting my thoughts as ever.
"Yes, I know, I should not be out of bed, and certainly not down here," he said as he slowly retreated to his chair, waving off my offer of assistance. "I could easily have fainted coming down the stairs, and you are far too tired to be scooping me up out of a broken heap on the landing."
There it was, that old familiar sensation of being watched and read so simply. It was hard to feel exactly comfortable as Holmes stripped me of my defences with such little effort, but as ever I was possessed by the unique intimacy of the act, a rare kind of absolute human connection from a man who resisted most all other forms.
"You are right, though. It is an intimidating job to bring my archive current," he continued. "I have been concerned about it myself. Refreshing my intrinsic understanding of the city will require much personal legwork with little to no way to delegate. At least for the index, I am fortunate to have both an extensive collection of newspapers gathered by my brother's minions from across the Empire and beyond, and a squad of freshly eager Irregulars who could well use some decent literacy and discernment training, not to mention some decent sustenance and shoes as recompense. It will take effort, but by my estimate we should be through the lot and at full capability again in six months. Perhaps a year if our work remains in such high demand."
A year. He said it as if it was nothing, as if it was possible to imagine our lives that far into the future and not utter foolishness to try. Perhaps for him, it was. The dawn yet hours away seemed a horizon distant enough for me. Roughly four hours and twenty minutes away, according to the pocket watch still lying open in my lap.
I watched the hands snapping forward. Four hours, nineteen minutes. Eighteen. Seventeen. I used to love sitting in silence beside him like this. Now I found it intolerable, and I broke it with more anger than I realized I'd been holding.
"You could have just kept it, you know. I already knew you meant to leave me behind. You told me to my face and you told me in the letter. I did not need to be reminded that you wanted me gone and made certain you had your wish."
"You think I stole your watch to lose you? What is the concept, that I believed some sudden minor time-telling problems would be enough to rid me of your troublesome dedicated presence? Watson, you are not an imbecile and neither am I. I can assure you my plans to abandon you were far more coherent than that."
"Then why didn't you follow through with any of them?"
"Hmm. A more apt question, one harder to answer. Selfishness, I suppose. Leaving you in safety and going ahead alone was the only ethical choice, and yet at every opportunity I found one flimsy excuse or another to avoid making it. In the end, Moriarty was considerate enough to fulfill my duty for me. Courtesy was ever the man's lone virtue."
"The only ethical choice was denying me any choice of my own."
"I attempted honesty and you refused to leave. Deception kept us alive, Watson. I shall not argue its value. I am not proud of the necessity of lying to you, and I do regret the real pain I know it caused, but I shall never be sorry that it spared our lives. Did you not observe the watch at all?"
"What am I observing? What is it I am supposed to see here?"
I picked the thing up and it swung in the air, shining in the light, this message I had no ability to decipher. I longed for a translator, not only for him but for me. When I put it down I slammed it on the table harder than I meant to, or perhaps exactly as hard as I meant to.
Holmes made no move to take it but gazed with cool melancholy at the strange prize before him.
"I genuinely thought you would find your way to it, or at least the more salient points. But I let myself forget that too, the guidance you require for even such basic deductive reasoning. Careless of me. So much carelessness."
Careless insult too, I might have said, but I knew that he did not mean it as cruelty. It was all merely disappointing fact to him, and he was far more disappointed in himself than in me. Holmes resolved himself with a heavy sigh and sat back to close his eyes.
"Tell me what it is you can see, Watson. I shall aid you down the path as needed."
I could not help but stop for a moment, caught by the overwhelming sensation of us wading into deep and treacherous waters. I hesitated, but I had to know where this river led. I began in the shallows with the basic construction of the device, but Holmes cut me short.
"It matters not at all what remains the same about the object from when last you possessed it. All value lies in what has been altered in the interim."
"You filed off the engraving to make it harder to identify."
"Now that is much better. An observation followed by an accurate inference, well done. What else?"
I picked the watch up again to turn it in my hand and I snapped it open easily several times.
"The hinge is tight and the release is in excellent condition. It has not been frequently used despite other appearances."
"Ah, that would be a step back. Look closer. Use my glass."
I knew where it was, of course. Where it had always been. Where he left it.
"Oh, this has been soldered. The hinge and latch are replacements, installed by a somewhat indelicate watchmaker. It is functional work, but the joinings are visible up close."
"'Somewhat indelicate'. Kind. Another might use 'clumsy' or 'amateurish'."
"You fixed this yourself."
Holmes said nothing.
"If you were taking the time to learn to repair, why not work more on the case? The silver is in such poor condition."
"Indeed it is. Why would that be?"
"You could have made the effort but you did not, which means you must have... chosen not to repair it? You wanted it to look this way. You wanted..."
I tried to think like him, about him, in that way he thinks about everything – with great intent.
"It was a character choice. An affectation for effect. It was a piece of your costume."
"That was part of it, yes. The timepiece an explorer carries on expedition is unlikely to be in pristine condition."
"But you said Sigerson was one of the first of your aliases. I don't even know how many identities you had after that. Surely they couldn't have all made sense with a mountain climber's worn pocket watch."
"Thirteen. And more did than you might think. Anonymity is easiest found in the lower rungs of society. I used the watch when I could, hid it when I could not."
Thirteen.
It took my breath away to imagine it.
Thirteen – no, fourteen, at least – faked names, histories, voices, personalities. I thought of all the temporary homes he must have lived in, all the temporary people he must have come to know in each new city. Fourteen separate sets of acquaintances and neighbours, colleagues and friends.
All those lives. All those lies.
"Holmes, I cannot keep playing this game. Please."
He opened his eyes and sat up to regard me, deciding how or if he would proceed.
"Then simply tell me this, Watson. What is it you are holding?"
I shuffled it again in my grasp, back and forth in my hands as if my left somehow had more to tell me than my right.
"I don't know what it is that you want me to say. It is a pocket watch. A timepiece. A gift. A memory. What is it you are digging for?"
"All of that. All that you have observed is exactly correct. You are missing but one point, the most central. What I told you when I presented it to you. You are holding evidence."
"But what does that mean? Evidence of what? That you were a thief?"
"That I was at all. It is real physical evidence that I could hold in my hands and know. This piece of John Watson survived, and thus did he, and thus did the Sherlock Holmes I was when I was with him. That was enough. In the darkest nights, in the most unknown places, when I had not worn my own face nor spoken in my own voice for months and then years, what remained of me was this stolen fragment of you. And when I held it, it was enough. I could feel the gears ticking between my palms, my heart beating beneath my ribs, and time moving inexorably forward. All I had to do was be patient. Be patient and survive."
His eyes were distant. In his mind he was still there, alone. We had both been so alone. My heart ached for him, for us.
"Holmes, I... how dearly I wish I could have been with you."
"I was grateful every day you were not."
He looked so much older now in the flickering shadows. I supposed I did too.
"I think you should keep it. I want you to."
"It is unnecessary. You forget the powers of my imagination. I know your watch's shape and weight perfectly in my mind. I can recall the tactile sensation of every scratch, ding, and repair upon it just as I can recall the circumstances for each in exacting detail. I know it intimately as a meticulous record of time lost and kept. I do not need to possess your gift in order to consider it whenever I wish and frequently when I do not."
"Can I ask why you had it out tonight, then?"
"I was hiding it away. I'd no intention of ever allowing you to know of my crime and what came of its spoils. This conversation I had hoped to permanently avoid. I was attempting to put your watch where you'd be least likely to discover it."
"The hollow space in your headboard. Where you kept your cocaine."
"One of the places. I had a number, as you are aware. The morocco case, the spare needle in the desk drawer, your medicinal supply in your bag upstairs. Somehow it was easier to ignore those in plain sight and effortless accessibility. But tonight there it was, my hidden cache preserved. I was compelled by the idea that once I valued that bottle so highly that I stored it among my few most personal artefacts, yet now I had forgotten about that choice entirely. How could that be? What else had I allowed to fall through my grasp? I had to try to remember."
"Did you?"
He thought for a long moment.
"I remembered serious stimulants are often as terrifying as they are invigorating. I remembered how much I once loved that intoxicating sensation of dancing on the fine edge of the blade, never quite certain on which side I'd fall. That dark pleasure may well be lost to me forever. All I felt tonight was fraught."
"Perhaps you have spent enough time on the edge of the blade now in life you no longer need to recreate it in chemicals."
"Perhaps. I fear I am discovering I am not entirely the same person I was when I left. I know that you are not. We are both of us similar, yes, but we are not the same."
"We would not be precisely the same men we were three years ago if nothing so dramatic had happened. Regular daily life is an altering experience in itself, however gradual. But we have been through a great rift, you and I, and both of us had to weather the long dark that followed alone."
"Only you were alone, Watson."
Where once Holmes would have let the moment drop in silence, now he spoke.
"Certainty of your safety I kept with me always. I trusted your love's companionship would keep you. After Mary's passing, you were left with nothing of either of us."
My throat tightened.
"Not... not nothing."
I thought of my home then filled with Mary's touches, the drawings she'd made in bed during her illness, the clothes she'd worn hanging with mine in our closet, the sweet perfume I'd bought her for our anniversary sitting on her dresser.
I thought of all my notebooks, my reliable direct link to Holmes always at the ready, one I spent the last years trying not to look up from. He lived forever there, vibrant, eternally present tense on paper and in my memory and in the memories of the ravenous reading audience. I was only too content to indulge their insatiable desire for what was lost, a hunger that I shared with them.
Holmes tilted his head at me. To him I was ever on display as a butterfly pinned beneath glass.
"Doctor, do you believe you will ever fully recover from the injury I have dealt you? You don't, and neither do I. I understood the blow I gave you was grievous. Painful and slow to heal, all of that was inevitable. I knew very well that I had shot you. What I did not imagine was how deep my bullet would go, how irrevocable it would be. Like its Jezail companion, you will bear it along with its ache for the rest of your life."
"But I am alive to bear it. As are you," I said, my voice unsteady. "Do you believe we would be sitting here in this moment had you not pulled the trigger?"
He pursed his lips.
"No."
"No. One or the both of us would be dead. You said it yourself. We both know what sacrifices can be required to stop great evil. Sherlock, look at what our sacrifices have brought. It is a safer, kinder world for what we went through. And you and I survive to enjoy it together."
He breathed deep and nodded at the undeniable truth. The only sound in the room was the crackle of the waning fire we watched together, orange embers still yet lit among the ashes. At last Holmes spoke, but so softly.
"Stand."
Confused, I blinked at him. There was something in his voice I had never heard before.
"Stand up, Watson. Please."
I was never going to do anything but comply. He stood too, still not fully steady, but stable enough to take the few short steps forward to approach me. There he stood, frozen in place, considering.
One thing I never forgot was how imposing Holmes could be when he was looming above me, close. But I sensed none of that imperiousness now, quite the opposite. What I could see of his face was full of complex thought and feeling.
As I was about to take a step back to look him in the eye and better read him, he at once wrapped his willowy arms around me and pulled me into his embrace.
I suppose I should have been stunned as I brought my own arms up his back to hold him, but my heart was not surprised at all that this was what he wanted, what he needed.
It was what I needed too.
For everything, my friend Sherlock Holmes was still human. He was not a ghost, not a miracle, not a machine.
He was human.
He was here.
"You deserve better, my dear Watson," he said, sighing into my hair. "We both know you always do. For whatever fool reason, you chose this life with me anyway. You choose it, present tense. You choose me and you continue to do so despite all rational sense. For that profound and unfailing absence of judgement, I am forever grateful."
I spoke into his neck.
"I've always believed one good fool deserves another. And you are the best I ever knew."
Holmes huffed a small laugh that reverberated through my chest.
"How I missed you, John."
At that moment, I should have liked to tell him how I missed him too. How I missed my dear friend's voice, his presence, his brilliance, his respect.
I should have liked to tell him how much I appreciated this open, vulnerable gesture, and that I knew what it took of him to even attempt it. Holmes' courage in the face of mortal danger was legendary, but this act took something different than heroism. He was braver now, stronger in a way I never knew before that he could be.
He was right. He was different now. And I should have liked to tell him that I was proud of him for it, proud of him for it all.
There were so many things I should have liked to tell him at that moment. But I was well beyond the ability to speak by then.
Instead, I did what I could do. I held him tighter.
I knew that he would understand me.
Some things never change.
Recipient:
methylviolet10bAuthor: [redacted]
Rating: G
Characters, including any pairing(s): Holmes/Watson
Warnings: Angst with a happy ending
Summary: In the early days after Holmes' return from his hiatus and death itself, Watson tries to settle back into Baker Street and determine what of them is different now and what remains the same.
I was a good sleeper once. I remembered those days clearly. When necessary, I slept soundly on rolling ships, in active battlefield surgeries, and in the midst of tropical monsoons. Later I discovered myself able to find rest amid the most savage violin torture, crammed in hiding inside a linen closet, or curled on a hay pile across from a giraffe in the barn of a forger. When I truly needed it, sleep was within my reach.
That was all before, of course. It had been years since I rested that easily. Now I often felt as if I was conducting a séance every night in my bedroom. Rituals were orchestrated, all the scene set just as the spirits demanded. I took my place and held out for a sign. More often than not, the result was the same as any attempt to contact a ghost, a long stretch of time waiting expectantly in the dark for something fleeting and miraculous, never to arrive.
I thought it might be different now. I had not only met a ghost, I was living in that ghost's upstairs bedroom again, by this time for almost a week. Sherlock Holmes had returned to London and life and me without warning and the world seemed fully upside down.
If we did not exit those old sitting room walls, I could almost pretend no time had passed as long as I ignored his new grey hairs as well as my own. Holmes never pursued Moriarty. He never allowed me to be lured away from him. He never left me a hastily scrawled letter and a weight in my heart I had borne since that day.
Outside, amazed eyes everywhere we went shattered the illusion. Sherlock Holmes was a walking miracle. It is not everyday that one sees the resurrected striding through the city in full casual nonchalance. A bit of his magic even rubbed off onto me, as if I had somehow been the medium that returned him to our living reality. In those first days, a strange disbelieving reverence followed the two of us about. News of Holmes was on the front page of every newspaper in the nation. Passers-by whispered to each other on the street, trying not to get caught pointing as I walked to the tobacconist and back.
Holmes had encouraged me to come to stay with him as early as that very first evening after Sebastian Moran nearly finished the job James Moriarty failed at all those years prior. This time, to my fortune, I was at his side to peel the villain's fingers away from Holmes' throat. We walked away together back across the street to our old rooms as if we were walking back in time. Back into a lost life, found perfectly preserved.
Our sitting room could have been a Sherlock Holmes museum. The only thing removed from it was dust. The palimpsest that he'd been studying was still laid open on his desk. His jackknife stood proudly lodged into the mantlepiece, holding up a small messy stack of yellowing telegrams for his attention. All that he'd left behind was waiting for him, exactly where he left it.
I, however, had moved my life out to other, less painful digs after I returned from the Continent and he did not. There was no John Watson museum to find now on my return. My heavy old desk I had left, so it was waiting for me with fresh paper and even my preferred brand of ink. But every book was missing, every letter gone from its slot. A comfortable new bed stood proudly next to an empty wardrobe. Mrs. Hudson's fresh handmade soap sat waiting and fragrant by the basin along with plenty of towels and water, but my razor was waiting for me uselessly on the other side of the city.
In a few days time, my things gradually were restored to their former places, as was I. New clashed against old. In the small hours, I laid in the soft featherbed and wondered who bought it and when. I wondered how long this room had been standing ready and waiting for my – for his – return. I wondered a great many things lying alone there in the dark.
That night, I readjusted myself for the likely fiftieth time and curled the comforter around me. Baker Street was not meant to be this quiet. Holmes only played his Stradivarius on our first night back, but he did it with a devout reverence, savoring its exquisite sound so long-missed. He had no desire yet to punish it for his boredom and certainly no need. We were swamped with work. Pent up demand for the greatest detective the world had ever known left him with his selection of mysteries from a sumptuous buffet. He picked and chose and our days were filled with problems and solutions. I adored every second of it, even if I continuously felt as if I had to be dreaming. Perhaps that is why I still found it so hard to fall asleep at the end of each day. Part of me believed it might wake me back up again.
As I wriggled my good shoulder into the pillow once more and tried to sink into at least some semblance of twilight, I heard a sound I had almost forgotten. My doorknob turned, although I did not hear the familiar click of the latch that used to precede Holmes bursting in with news and plans and absolutely no decorum whatsoever.
I opened my eyes. A slit in the curtains cast a narrow shaft of moonlight onto the door. It remained shut, motionless, but I could not be. I pushed my blankets aside to stand. Abruptly, the knob rattled again, and footsteps paddled away at a clip.
Holmes was already halfway down the stairs by the time I opened the door, as swift as he had ever been on his lean grasshopper legs. On hearing his name, he turned around casually, leaning onto the railing.
"Watson! I am surprised to see you up at such an uncivilized hour. I was off on my way toward dreamland myself."
"You woke me," I said, approximating the truth.
"Ah, yes. You have my apologies. Shall not happen again."
"Wait, what did you want?"
I reached for him and caught his wrist along with an idea of what he had come to me for.
"Holmes, you are as hot as a lit match. You are ill?"
"No, in no real sense am I ill. I thank you, Doctor, I shall leave you be."
My grip on him did not slip as he tried to pull away. Holmes relented, but he did not quite meet my eyes.
"As I said, I am perfectly hale, but, as it happens, I may be experiencing a mild... an almost certainly very mild overdose of cocaine."
"What? Why did you not simply tell me that?" I asked as I dragged him back toward my medical bag and the nearest bed, my own.
"Well, I am aware of your negative feelings regarding this particular proclivity, Watson. If possible, I had hoped not to involve you at all."
"So you came to my door in the middle of the night."
"No, I changed my mind at your door in the middle of the night. There, I arrived at the proper realization that your professional efforts were entirely unnecessary as my anxiety about my various symptoms was merely one of the symptoms itself."
"That does not make those symptoms any less hazardous. What are you feeling? Here, take this thermometer."
"Do you wish to hear my complaints, Doctor, or would you prefer to ascertain my temperature? I do not believe both are simultaneously possible in the physical sense. I suppose if you were willing to sacrifice some precision in measurement and also able to accurately interpret my racing words from behind pursed lips and clenched teeth, you might–"
"Temperature," I said. "And lie back."
If he was able to be this talkative, I was relatively certain he would be well. In my experience, dying men tended not to be quite so droll. Still, a hard pit of worry sat in my stomach. At least Holmes was easier to examine with his mouth shut.
His self-diagnosis seemed correct by all observations. Heightened blood pressure, a fine tremor, pupils wide and black. A mild overdose of cocaine it was.
Holmes was right about another thing as well. As I pulled the thermometer with its unnaturally long quicksilver line from under his tongue, I was indeed experiencing some negative feelings regarding his behaviour.
"You'll survive for another elective misadventure, Holmes. You can relax."
"Hmm, in theory, perhaps, but I am not of the belief that relaxation is in my range of capabilities at the moment. Would you settle for turbulent in place of tranquil? How about electrified? I feel as if I should be running or climbing a tree."
His hands grasped in the air at imagined limbs. I pushed them back down.
"You'll do nothing more than lie still."
He obeyed as best he could, which was little. As I fished through my bag to fill a syringe, he squirmed in place and watched me.
"You're wrong, you know," he said. "I did stop. For years I have had not a single drop. That abstinence was not initially of my own volition, I will admit. A clean and reliable supply of my vice became impossible to source while changing cities and faces every few days. I gave it up all at once in one long week at a remote country inn outside Bratislava."
"All at once? The withdrawal must have been a misery. Why would you start again after all that?"
For the first time, Holmes did not have an immediate response.
"I came upon an old kit of mine here tonight," he said at last. "My emergency supply, long ago secreted away and more recently forgotten about entirely. It was hidden in my best acorn hole after all this time, the hollow space I created in the leg of my headboard. I suppose you and Mrs. Hudson never found it."
"We never looked for it. Try to relax yourself now."
A single fresh puncture wound sat red and angry in the crook of his elbow. My needle made a twin for it in a nest of long healed scars. I left to fetch him some cool water to drink and myself some space to breathe. Holmes was quieter when I returned.
"Any better?"
"My chest no longer feels so tight as to possibly implode at any given moment and my thoughts are not coming at me in a cyclonic chaos, so yes, Doctor, I would unreservedly agree with better."
"You used your old dose, didn't you? Your tolerance has dropped."
"Yes, I did notice that. And not just mine, I think."
I sighed and settled into the new too-small chair beside my bed. Any distant hope of sleep tonight had vanished.
Holmes drank the water I gave him and submitted to a cold compress without complaint. He was silent and still for a long time. Then all at once, he held out his clenched fist to me.
"You deserve a better explanation, I know. Sometimes the only explanation one has to offer is evidence."
With reluctance, he uncurled his long fingers to reveal a plain silver pocket watch. How he had produced it from seeming thin air was the magician's flair that I remembered.
The watch was scuffed and badly worn. It was not until I had it in my own hands that I recognized it.
This was mine, my old pocket watch, a gift Holmes had given me after our first extraordinarily lucrative case resolved so long ago, the delicate recovery of the McCarver pearls. I almost missed his grand resolution with the baroness and the barber's scissors by missing a train in Hertfordshire.
"A good partner should have a reliable timepiece to arrive promptly when he is needed," he said as he handed it to me a week later with no pomp but a wry spark in his eye. I told him I was honoured, and I was.
He had never called me his partner before.
Now it looked as if my watch had lived a dozen lives in the time I had missed it. Scratches in the case caught the glint of the light. Small dings left the metal pockmarked. It was filed bare of the fine engraving of my initials it had once worn.
"How on earth did you get this? You had it all this time? I thought I'd lost it."
"As you were meant to. I pickpocketed it off of you on the road from Strasburg."
"But why would you steal my watch? I would have simply given it to you if I'd only known you had use for it."
"Of course you would have, which is why I had to steal it. It isn't as if I needed it, except that I did, more than I could even then know. Observe and deduce, Watson. I know you remember my methods."
He closed his eyes and pretended to rest.
So this was his explanation somehow, of something, this hunk of tarnished silver sitting heavy in my palm. Holmes clearly had no interest in elaborating himself. That was for the best for now, I thought. Perhaps the sedative I had administered would pull him down into a real, recovering sleep as he playacted at a fake one. I settled in for the wait either way and turned my new, old toy toward the candlelight.
I was meant to understand something from this small device he'd given to and taken from me, perhaps a good many things. If the object of a crime belonged to anyone else, Holmes would be eager to tell me about it at length, following the relentless cascade of detail and logic down to its inevitable source. But this evidence was mine, the theft his, and the meaning behind any of it confused to missing, at least to me.
Observe and deduce, Watson. I know you remember my methods.
He was right of course, but knowing his methods and applying them to any fruition were always two distinctly different things. I tried to decide what it was he meant for me to see. The condition of the watch? The wear? Upon inspection, it appeared someone had mutilated it with a straight file or some such, haphazardly repolished it, then left it to rattle around freely with coins and keys for a year or maybe three. From the outside, it looked cheap and long used but the actual functioning machinery inside seemed relatively pristine. The crystal had been damaged, yes, but less, and the movements beneath ticked forward crisply.
So Holmes had filed my name off of the case before anything else, and that made easy sense to me. He was running, hiding in foreign lands under falsified identities. A fine silver gentleman's watch was a risk to carry on its own, much less one with my initials engraved upon it. It was a calling card printed plainly for all the wrong eyes to read. I could imagine him sitting in some dingy rented room, hastily carving off the last remnants of anything bearing either of our names.
But why had he even taken it, then? Why go through the trouble of keeping it after he had? What was to be gained by stealing a timepiece he had no real use for by his own admission?
It isn't as if I needed it, except that I did, more than I could even then know.
He said he had taken it from me as we left Strasburg. Many of the various localities we passed through on our flight were unmemorable. Strasburg was impossible to forget.
Holmes did everything he could think of to get me to leave him and return to London the morning after Professor Moriarty slipped his noose. He called himself dangerous now, as if he had ever been anything but, not least to himself. He appealed to my reason, and when that failed, he attempted to insult me away instead. On realizing even his worst was nothing to me, he brought out his best.
"You must understand that Moriarty is less a criminal than an unnatural force of injustice itself, a casual destroyer of lives for the sheer sport and profit of cruelty. If our clash does not end with his undoing, I consign untold hundreds, nay, thousands of souls over the years to misery and death by his will. I am determined to spare as many as I am able. John, you are not merely one of that number. You are the very first."
"If he kills you and walks away free, it will be zero of that number. You need help. You need someone at your back."
"I have no intention of allowing him to walk away free. All the more reason to send you home. I shall not ask you to break your oath, Doctor. What comes next is not something for a healer."
"No, it is something for a soldier. You forget what I have seen, what I have done in my lifetime."
"Never. I know well what war has wrought and still yet wreaks upon you. I will not add to that tally."
Our debate and occasional shouting match went on, but I refused to bend. At last Sherlock Holmes conceded defeat with the drop of his obstinate shoulders.
Or at least he feigned defeat. Is that why he took my watch? To find another way to win? To make me lose track of time, miss another train perhaps, and allow him the space to slip away from me unnoticed?
But if that was the intent, why didn't he follow through with it? A week we trekked through the Rhone valley and the Swiss mountains after that day, with Holmes as filled with energy as he could possibly be and I filled with trepidation. He could have abandoned me easily as I watched behind for our pursuer and not ahead at him. As clever as he is, he could have tricked me and left me behind a dozen times over.
And yet he never did. Day after day and town after town, we arrived and we left together. Only Moriarty himself succeeded at tricking me away from Holmes' side in the end, albeit with his willing consent and cooperation.
That moment I had run through in my mind a thousand times since the day as though I could change the past through sheer force of imagination. As if I could see the moment he chose to send me from the fray and this time find some way to prevent it.
There it was all over again, as fresh and raw as it had ever been.
Holmes peered over me, reading the note in my hands upside down faster than I could read it properly.
I hesitated, questioning the messenger boy on the few details, trying to estimate how long I was likely to be needed. A part of me dimly hoped this consumptive Englishwoman was nearer the end of her suffering than even the letter suggested. I told myself it was mercy. I knew in my heart it was nothing but fear.
Streaks of sun refracted into spectrums in the billowing mist. The falling waters echoed all around us. As it carried over the roil, his voice was calm, fascinated.
"The light here is singularly dramatic, is it not? Perfection in its way. I think I should like to stay a while."
Leaned against the stone, Holmes kept his hand in his pocket and his gaze fixed upon the chasm. His shadow cut trim and black across the footpath between us.
I turned my back to him, on him.
A while became forever.
A tear I'd not intended rolling down my cheek startled me back into the present. I wiped it away with the heel of my hand, grateful to find my patient by now truly asleep and no longer able to bear witness.
In my new bed in my old room, Holmes at last looked at peace. My friend, whose empty coffin I had carried, whose funeral I had endured, whose loss I had mourned with all of my soul, lay relaxed and dozing at my side, breathing softly, breathing at all.
In that moment, everything seemed possible. Everything seemed temporary.
Forever had been, after all.
I left the room to let him sleep. If I stayed, I was certain to end up waking him, and Holmes needed rest now more than anything after the night's near-disaster. The immediate danger for him was passed. Instead, all the risk for him lay in the future, with the sway of the drug over his senses now returned as alive and vibrant as he was.
Downstairs in the sitting room, the air seemed less stifling. I dropped myself into my chair by the fireplace and for some time accosted the smoldering cinders with the poker as if I could interrogate them for answers.
Everything here was Holmes as he had been, a fossilised image of him left trapped exact in amber. Was it who he was still? How much had he changed from the day I left him, the day he left me? Had he changed at all? I tried to imagine what the past meant to a formerly dead man, but I found I did not know what it meant to a formerly grieving man either. Not yet.
Above me, his commonplace books lined perfectly dusted but otherwise long untouched shelves. This was his grand index, crafted meticulously with the names, relationships, and histories for notable criminals and important persons across no fewer than four continents. It was Holmes' finest resource, and now it was surely out of date and untrustworthy. Even his prized mental maps of the city and its environs would have to be recreated en masse. Buildings had been demolished and built in the time he was away. Bridges and roads laid. Restaurants and residents had come and gone and come again. Change was everywhere in our Empire's great capital, and Sherlock Holmes had seen none of it.
"It won't take as long as you think."
I turned to find Holmes leaning in the doorway, looking weary with my own robe dangling limply from his bony shoulders. He was as thin as I'd ever seen him but as adept at interpreting my thoughts as ever.
"Yes, I know, I should not be out of bed, and certainly not down here," he said as he slowly retreated to his chair, waving off my offer of assistance. "I could easily have fainted coming down the stairs, and you are far too tired to be scooping me up out of a broken heap on the landing."
There it was, that old familiar sensation of being watched and read so simply. It was hard to feel exactly comfortable as Holmes stripped me of my defences with such little effort, but as ever I was possessed by the unique intimacy of the act, a rare kind of absolute human connection from a man who resisted most all other forms.
"You are right, though. It is an intimidating job to bring my archive current," he continued. "I have been concerned about it myself. Refreshing my intrinsic understanding of the city will require much personal legwork with little to no way to delegate. At least for the index, I am fortunate to have both an extensive collection of newspapers gathered by my brother's minions from across the Empire and beyond, and a squad of freshly eager Irregulars who could well use some decent literacy and discernment training, not to mention some decent sustenance and shoes as recompense. It will take effort, but by my estimate we should be through the lot and at full capability again in six months. Perhaps a year if our work remains in such high demand."
A year. He said it as if it was nothing, as if it was possible to imagine our lives that far into the future and not utter foolishness to try. Perhaps for him, it was. The dawn yet hours away seemed a horizon distant enough for me. Roughly four hours and twenty minutes away, according to the pocket watch still lying open in my lap.
I watched the hands snapping forward. Four hours, nineteen minutes. Eighteen. Seventeen. I used to love sitting in silence beside him like this. Now I found it intolerable, and I broke it with more anger than I realized I'd been holding.
"You could have just kept it, you know. I already knew you meant to leave me behind. You told me to my face and you told me in the letter. I did not need to be reminded that you wanted me gone and made certain you had your wish."
"You think I stole your watch to lose you? What is the concept, that I believed some sudden minor time-telling problems would be enough to rid me of your troublesome dedicated presence? Watson, you are not an imbecile and neither am I. I can assure you my plans to abandon you were far more coherent than that."
"Then why didn't you follow through with any of them?"
"Hmm. A more apt question, one harder to answer. Selfishness, I suppose. Leaving you in safety and going ahead alone was the only ethical choice, and yet at every opportunity I found one flimsy excuse or another to avoid making it. In the end, Moriarty was considerate enough to fulfill my duty for me. Courtesy was ever the man's lone virtue."
"The only ethical choice was denying me any choice of my own."
"I attempted honesty and you refused to leave. Deception kept us alive, Watson. I shall not argue its value. I am not proud of the necessity of lying to you, and I do regret the real pain I know it caused, but I shall never be sorry that it spared our lives. Did you not observe the watch at all?"
"What am I observing? What is it I am supposed to see here?"
I picked the thing up and it swung in the air, shining in the light, this message I had no ability to decipher. I longed for a translator, not only for him but for me. When I put it down I slammed it on the table harder than I meant to, or perhaps exactly as hard as I meant to.
Holmes made no move to take it but gazed with cool melancholy at the strange prize before him.
"I genuinely thought you would find your way to it, or at least the more salient points. But I let myself forget that too, the guidance you require for even such basic deductive reasoning. Careless of me. So much carelessness."
Careless insult too, I might have said, but I knew that he did not mean it as cruelty. It was all merely disappointing fact to him, and he was far more disappointed in himself than in me. Holmes resolved himself with a heavy sigh and sat back to close his eyes.
"Tell me what it is you can see, Watson. I shall aid you down the path as needed."
I could not help but stop for a moment, caught by the overwhelming sensation of us wading into deep and treacherous waters. I hesitated, but I had to know where this river led. I began in the shallows with the basic construction of the device, but Holmes cut me short.
"It matters not at all what remains the same about the object from when last you possessed it. All value lies in what has been altered in the interim."
"You filed off the engraving to make it harder to identify."
"Now that is much better. An observation followed by an accurate inference, well done. What else?"
I picked the watch up again to turn it in my hand and I snapped it open easily several times.
"The hinge is tight and the release is in excellent condition. It has not been frequently used despite other appearances."
"Ah, that would be a step back. Look closer. Use my glass."
I knew where it was, of course. Where it had always been. Where he left it.
"Oh, this has been soldered. The hinge and latch are replacements, installed by a somewhat indelicate watchmaker. It is functional work, but the joinings are visible up close."
"'Somewhat indelicate'. Kind. Another might use 'clumsy' or 'amateurish'."
"You fixed this yourself."
Holmes said nothing.
"If you were taking the time to learn to repair, why not work more on the case? The silver is in such poor condition."
"Indeed it is. Why would that be?"
"You could have made the effort but you did not, which means you must have... chosen not to repair it? You wanted it to look this way. You wanted..."
I tried to think like him, about him, in that way he thinks about everything – with great intent.
"It was a character choice. An affectation for effect. It was a piece of your costume."
"That was part of it, yes. The timepiece an explorer carries on expedition is unlikely to be in pristine condition."
"But you said Sigerson was one of the first of your aliases. I don't even know how many identities you had after that. Surely they couldn't have all made sense with a mountain climber's worn pocket watch."
"Thirteen. And more did than you might think. Anonymity is easiest found in the lower rungs of society. I used the watch when I could, hid it when I could not."
Thirteen.
It took my breath away to imagine it.
Thirteen – no, fourteen, at least – faked names, histories, voices, personalities. I thought of all the temporary homes he must have lived in, all the temporary people he must have come to know in each new city. Fourteen separate sets of acquaintances and neighbours, colleagues and friends.
All those lives. All those lies.
"Holmes, I cannot keep playing this game. Please."
He opened his eyes and sat up to regard me, deciding how or if he would proceed.
"Then simply tell me this, Watson. What is it you are holding?"
I shuffled it again in my grasp, back and forth in my hands as if my left somehow had more to tell me than my right.
"I don't know what it is that you want me to say. It is a pocket watch. A timepiece. A gift. A memory. What is it you are digging for?"
"All of that. All that you have observed is exactly correct. You are missing but one point, the most central. What I told you when I presented it to you. You are holding evidence."
"But what does that mean? Evidence of what? That you were a thief?"
"That I was at all. It is real physical evidence that I could hold in my hands and know. This piece of John Watson survived, and thus did he, and thus did the Sherlock Holmes I was when I was with him. That was enough. In the darkest nights, in the most unknown places, when I had not worn my own face nor spoken in my own voice for months and then years, what remained of me was this stolen fragment of you. And when I held it, it was enough. I could feel the gears ticking between my palms, my heart beating beneath my ribs, and time moving inexorably forward. All I had to do was be patient. Be patient and survive."
His eyes were distant. In his mind he was still there, alone. We had both been so alone. My heart ached for him, for us.
"Holmes, I... how dearly I wish I could have been with you."
"I was grateful every day you were not."
He looked so much older now in the flickering shadows. I supposed I did too.
"I think you should keep it. I want you to."
"It is unnecessary. You forget the powers of my imagination. I know your watch's shape and weight perfectly in my mind. I can recall the tactile sensation of every scratch, ding, and repair upon it just as I can recall the circumstances for each in exacting detail. I know it intimately as a meticulous record of time lost and kept. I do not need to possess your gift in order to consider it whenever I wish and frequently when I do not."
"Can I ask why you had it out tonight, then?"
"I was hiding it away. I'd no intention of ever allowing you to know of my crime and what came of its spoils. This conversation I had hoped to permanently avoid. I was attempting to put your watch where you'd be least likely to discover it."
"The hollow space in your headboard. Where you kept your cocaine."
"One of the places. I had a number, as you are aware. The morocco case, the spare needle in the desk drawer, your medicinal supply in your bag upstairs. Somehow it was easier to ignore those in plain sight and effortless accessibility. But tonight there it was, my hidden cache preserved. I was compelled by the idea that once I valued that bottle so highly that I stored it among my few most personal artefacts, yet now I had forgotten about that choice entirely. How could that be? What else had I allowed to fall through my grasp? I had to try to remember."
"Did you?"
He thought for a long moment.
"I remembered serious stimulants are often as terrifying as they are invigorating. I remembered how much I once loved that intoxicating sensation of dancing on the fine edge of the blade, never quite certain on which side I'd fall. That dark pleasure may well be lost to me forever. All I felt tonight was fraught."
"Perhaps you have spent enough time on the edge of the blade now in life you no longer need to recreate it in chemicals."
"Perhaps. I fear I am discovering I am not entirely the same person I was when I left. I know that you are not. We are both of us similar, yes, but we are not the same."
"We would not be precisely the same men we were three years ago if nothing so dramatic had happened. Regular daily life is an altering experience in itself, however gradual. But we have been through a great rift, you and I, and both of us had to weather the long dark that followed alone."
"Only you were alone, Watson."
Where once Holmes would have let the moment drop in silence, now he spoke.
"Certainty of your safety I kept with me always. I trusted your love's companionship would keep you. After Mary's passing, you were left with nothing of either of us."
My throat tightened.
"Not... not nothing."
I thought of my home then filled with Mary's touches, the drawings she'd made in bed during her illness, the clothes she'd worn hanging with mine in our closet, the sweet perfume I'd bought her for our anniversary sitting on her dresser.
I thought of all my notebooks, my reliable direct link to Holmes always at the ready, one I spent the last years trying not to look up from. He lived forever there, vibrant, eternally present tense on paper and in my memory and in the memories of the ravenous reading audience. I was only too content to indulge their insatiable desire for what was lost, a hunger that I shared with them.
Holmes tilted his head at me. To him I was ever on display as a butterfly pinned beneath glass.
"Doctor, do you believe you will ever fully recover from the injury I have dealt you? You don't, and neither do I. I understood the blow I gave you was grievous. Painful and slow to heal, all of that was inevitable. I knew very well that I had shot you. What I did not imagine was how deep my bullet would go, how irrevocable it would be. Like its Jezail companion, you will bear it along with its ache for the rest of your life."
"But I am alive to bear it. As are you," I said, my voice unsteady. "Do you believe we would be sitting here in this moment had you not pulled the trigger?"
He pursed his lips.
"No."
"No. One or the both of us would be dead. You said it yourself. We both know what sacrifices can be required to stop great evil. Sherlock, look at what our sacrifices have brought. It is a safer, kinder world for what we went through. And you and I survive to enjoy it together."
He breathed deep and nodded at the undeniable truth. The only sound in the room was the crackle of the waning fire we watched together, orange embers still yet lit among the ashes. At last Holmes spoke, but so softly.
"Stand."
Confused, I blinked at him. There was something in his voice I had never heard before.
"Stand up, Watson. Please."
I was never going to do anything but comply. He stood too, still not fully steady, but stable enough to take the few short steps forward to approach me. There he stood, frozen in place, considering.
One thing I never forgot was how imposing Holmes could be when he was looming above me, close. But I sensed none of that imperiousness now, quite the opposite. What I could see of his face was full of complex thought and feeling.
As I was about to take a step back to look him in the eye and better read him, he at once wrapped his willowy arms around me and pulled me into his embrace.
I suppose I should have been stunned as I brought my own arms up his back to hold him, but my heart was not surprised at all that this was what he wanted, what he needed.
It was what I needed too.
For everything, my friend Sherlock Holmes was still human. He was not a ghost, not a miracle, not a machine.
He was human.
He was here.
"You deserve better, my dear Watson," he said, sighing into my hair. "We both know you always do. For whatever fool reason, you chose this life with me anyway. You choose it, present tense. You choose me and you continue to do so despite all rational sense. For that profound and unfailing absence of judgement, I am forever grateful."
I spoke into his neck.
"I've always believed one good fool deserves another. And you are the best I ever knew."
Holmes huffed a small laugh that reverberated through my chest.
"How I missed you, John."
At that moment, I should have liked to tell him how I missed him too. How I missed my dear friend's voice, his presence, his brilliance, his respect.
I should have liked to tell him how much I appreciated this open, vulnerable gesture, and that I knew what it took of him to even attempt it. Holmes' courage in the face of mortal danger was legendary, but this act took something different than heroism. He was braver now, stronger in a way I never knew before that he could be.
He was right. He was different now. And I should have liked to tell him that I was proud of him for it, proud of him for it all.
There were so many things I should have liked to tell him at that moment. But I was well beyond the ability to speak by then.
Instead, I did what I could do. I held him tighter.
I knew that he would understand me.
Some things never change.
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Date: 2020-03-30 10:30 pm (UTC)I'm in awe at the layers of characterization you've put into this, both while exploring their grief and betrayal, and in the smaller bits of worldbuilding (like Holmes' hiding places and Mary's passion for drawing).
"A while became forever" is possibly one of my favorite lines in this fic, it hit me like punch in the guts.
An incredible fic, thank you anon, this was a pleasure to read!
no subject
Date: 2020-04-01 11:53 pm (UTC)