Fic for colebaltblue: Strength in Humility
Title: Strength in Humility
Read on A03: Here
Recipient: colebaltblue
Author: mistyzeo
Characters/Pairings: Holmes/Watson, side Mary/OFC
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None.
Summary: A brave man accepts help when it is offered. Five times Watson needed some help, and one time he needed nothing at all.
Notes: A thousand thanks to tweedisgood for beta reading and suggestions. We both know what trouble I have with the word "gotten."
Dear colebaltblue, happy holmestice. You mentioned a desire for a slice of life in whatever time period I enjoyed most, and I hope that I've given you six little slices that will amuse in ALL the time periods. I've played a little fast and loose with the details, but let's say it's an experiment and I look forward to seeing the results. :D Yours, this secret author.
One: In The Army
I will never forget the sound of the gunfire that horrible day. In my weak moments and my nightmares, it rattles through me, piercing my eardrums as easily as the bullets pierced my skin, and lodges in my brain as the shrapnel did into my muscle and bone. For a long time in London, even after I met Sherlock Holmes and we started sharing digs, I could not stand the sound of a metal-tipped cane on the pavement, nor the tumble of coins onto a countertop. Everything reminded me of the afternoon spent with blood on my hands, never certain if what I did was enough.
As a surgeon, I had not been expected to join the fray. The medics' tent was erected well back from the line of skirmish, and though our supplies were running low and there was no clean water to be had, I remember being determined to make the best of it. My assistant, Mr Murray, was at my side, constantly running to and fro for tools, fresh bandages, water, more water. When the fighting began, I steeled myself for the worst. I would lose patients, I told myself, but I had to keep the number as low as I humanly could.
It went on all afternoon. It was the middle of July, and though the tent kept off the worst of the sun, the air was thick with heat and sand, and sweat ran in my eyes. Murray and I worked frantically as the casualties began to rack up, brought to us on stretchers and on foot, and often left lying there by the tent, as if their bearers hoped they'd be able to get up and walk the last few feet once we had a bench free. The Afghans had a couple of modern Armstrong guns, and the effect of these was devastating.
My hands were stiff with blood. There weren't enough bandages to staunch all the bleeding, and I began to tear apart the uniforms off the men's own bodies to bind their wounds. I sewed flesh like a man possessed, and tore suture thread with my teeth. I took off limbs like they were nothing, expendable, and ruined many a life even as I saved it.
To make a long story short, the Ghazi attack collapsed the 66th Regiment like wet paper, and suddenly what should have been this place of refuge behind the lines was surrounded. The gunfire was too loud, too close, and the man under my hands began to scream. My left shoulder exploded with pain. I fell to the ground, the world going dark for a moment before I recovered my senses. Blood poured down my arm, and it took me three tries to get up. When I did, I stumbled back to my table as though I could go on doing what I had been doing. The soldier had fainted. I was near to doing the same myself.
I heard Murray's voice as though from a long way off, and I turned towards the sound, in a daze.
"Sir!" he was calling. "Doctor Watson!" Then close to me, just at my ear, bawling over the noise of guns, "You've been hit, sir; we need to move out!"
I remember saying, "I can't," but he shook his head and began to lead me away.
"Sir, the medics will move them. We just need to fall back, sir, come on, there you go." He was encouraging me as one would a child taking reluctant steps, and I knew I was going into shock. I could feel my body temperature dropping and my hand and legs beginning to shake.
"Just a little farther, sir," Murray was saying when the second bullet tore into my thigh. I collapsed, and for a long time I was in a dark haze, aware only of the pain and the blood I was losing.
Truth be told, I was lucky. Murray had enough sense to be leading me towards a mule train, and when I went down he said he lifted me onto the back of one of the poor, frightened animals. He was with me when I awoke, a day later and a few pints of blood shorter.
He said I asked him how he did, though I don't remember that first awakening. He hadn't suffered a scratch, thank God, and had kept us abreast of the retreat at all times, so that the moment we reached a field hospital I was on a stretcher and under the knife. The next time I was conscious, he told me he had assisted in the operation, and he didn't need to add that he was the reason I was alive. I knew that right away.
Mr Murray was given a medal of honour for assisting an officer under fire, and I was given a discharge. I don't hold it against him for a moment; both were well deserved. I suspect they had decided to discharge me even before I fell victim to the fever that had me lying in hospital for three weeks, but I didn't receive it until afterwards.
I suspect Murray had something to do with that, too.
Two: With The Rent
The day had started out so promising. It was a beautiful spring morning, my leg was no longer aching in the cold grip of winter, and I had collected my pension. A modest list of accomplishments, I thought, but worth notice in my newly simple life. I had much to be grateful for-my life, my liberty, and my returning health among them- and I was determined to be thankful for every little thing that day.
With a comfortably full pocket book I set off for home, intending to hand over my half of the month's rent immediately. I knew full well what I might be capable of if left to my own devices and the promise of a few fast horses. The rent wasn't due for another week, but I thought better to put it away early than risk losing it.
My intentions were good, but because of the splendid day and the renewed strength in my bad leg I chose to walk back to Baker Street, rather than take a cab. Why spend money today of all days? I was flush with it, and I meant to save it for important things. I had my eye on a fine pen and inkwell set for my desk, newly installed by the window in the sitting room. I could treat Holmes to a trip to the opera. I could put a little away into savings, and perhaps someday I would start my own practice.
As I walked, humming to myself, nodding to young ladies, tapping my cane upon the ground, I discovered I was not heading for Baker Street at all, but for my club. I had not been a member for long- upon Stamford's recommendation I was accepted, which was the least in an extensive line of favours Stamford had done me- and so I looked forward to socializing a while with my new companions.
The club was quiet when I entered, but there was a game of cards going on at a table in the card room, and two fellows about my age were playing billiards in the room adjoining. I watched them for a while, making small talk, and then moved on to the card game. One of the players was in the process of abandoning his seat, protesting that he must be getting on, had to finish the errands his wife had sent him on, lest she begin to worry. His friends- my soon-to-be downfall- teased him good-naturedly and bid him farewell, and turned right around to welcome me to the table.
I couldn't turn them down. I had found exactly what I'd been looking for, and I was never a man to ignore the lure of a friendly wager.
A friendly wager it was not. Within an hour I had lost the majority of my month's pay, and with it all the dreams I had entertained on my walk from the army office. Gone was the new ink well, gone was the trip to the opera, and, most painfully, gone was the imaginary office with my name on the door which I had already begun to populate with imaginary patients.
I signed over my pension cheque with a heavy heart (and a very false laugh), and departed from the club immediately. Now my walk to Baker Street was compulsory, and every cab that rattled past was a taunt. I reached the front door of 221 too quickly, having not yet come up with a plan of action. I was broke. I unlocked the door.
Every step I climbed was torture. My stomach actually hurt, I was so worried. Holmes would toss me out on my ear for certain. I had not yet ascertained exactly what his profession was, but he would not have been looking to share rooms if it was very lucrative. Nor would he have accepted me as a room mate if he had known what a failure I was. I dreaded what I had to do.
To my relief and horror, he was not in the sitting room when I entered. The former, because I would not have to face my fate immediately; the latter for the very same reason.
I did not have to wait long. In fact, I had only just hung up my hat when he burst from his bedroom, arms spread in what must have been triumph.
"Watson!" he cried, his face lit up with pleasure. "You're back. What a splendid afternoon it is, isn't it?" He shook me by the hand with great enthusiasm, and it sent my teeth rattling in my head. "Oh, I've just had the most magnificent visitor; I wish you'd been here."
"Oh," I said, dazed. "Was she very beautiful?"
Holmes barked a laugh. "Ha! Watson, your pawky sense of humour will get the better of you one of these days." Not my sense of humour, I thought. "No, it was a gentlemen with a splendid little puzzle- why, Watson." He stopped suddenly, staring into my face. "Whatever is the matter? Sit down, my dear fellow; you look awful. Are you in pain?"
"Holmes," I said, resisting his attempts to lead me to the armchair by the fireplace. "I'm afraid I have to beg you for a favour."
"Please do," Holmes said, and let go of my arm. He was still looking at me intently, his brows furrowed. As I tried to think of a tactful way to either ask him to cover my half of the rent this month, or even to admit that I had lost all my money in one fell swoop, his expression cleared and the corner of his mouth twitched. "You picked up your pension today," he said. "You left the house this morning in a fine state, but you've returned quite low. Was it the horses again, my dear boy, or something else? Cards? It was cards."
"Oh," I breathed, "how ever did you guess?"
"I don't guess," Holmes said firmly. "You have a habit, it's not hard to tell: your rather thin cheque book gives you away, along with the list of sums I have sometimes spied when you leave your journal open on your desk, and your thrice pawned pocket watch."
I blinked at him. I had not pawned my pocket watch, but that was another matter.
"And," he went on, "you have a general odour of tobacco upon you which is not your own, which leads me to believe you have stopped in at your new club."
The man was a marvel. I had almost forgotten my dilemma; how could he know so much about me?! But the mention of the club brought it all back, and my look of wonder must have crumpled.
"Yes," I said. "I didn't mean to."
"Of course not," Holmes said briskly. "But I must say that if you intend to continue living here, we must come to an agreement."
I flushed a miserable, embarrassed red.
Holmes held out his hand. "Give me your cheque book. I will lock it in my desk."
"Holmes!"
"The only way to cure you of your ills is to deprive you of them entirely." Holmes brandished his open palm, and I fished my cheque book out of my pocket. I hesitated in handing it to him, so he snatched it away. "I will give it to you if you ask," he said, putting it away in the drawer and turning the key, "but that will be the deterrent. As for the rent, my recent visitor will take care of that. Chin up, Watson."
I took a deep breath, and obeyed.
Three: With the Public
"Holmes," I said, struck with an idea, "what if I were to get married?"
"Not to me, I hope," he said, not looking up from his bench which turned our sitting room into a laboratory. He was working on a particularly pungent experiment, and I had opened all the windows in an attempt to keep the place liveable. "I would make a decidedly unsatisfactory housewife."
"Not literally married," I said, smiling.
"Figuratively married?"
"Fictionally married."
He looked up then, frowning at me from across the room. "Why ever would you do that?"
"How long have we been… together?"
Holmes raised an eyebrow. "Living together, or together together?"
I shrugged.
"What year is it?"
I laughed. "1890," I said, amazed. "You don't mean to tell me you don't-"
"Nearly ten years," he said. "As to the second, seven years, six months, twenty four days."
I blinked. He wasn't the sort of man to remember birthdays or bank holidays. I hadn't expected him to know the length of our affair down to the day. Then again, who knew what sort of information he deemed important for his lumber room of a brain. Apparently that counted. I blushed.
"Well," I said, fumbling now, caught off guard by his sentimentality, "isn't it strange that we've lived together ten years, and neither of us has made any sort of move towards a wife or a family?"
Holmes put his chemical instruments down and sighed. "It isn't strange to me," he said, and I could hear the hurt in his voice. "But if you think it's strange, then by all means, go get married."
Damn. I hadn't meant to make him cross. I got up from my desk and went to him, and he let me take his hands in mine. "I didn't mean that," I said, "I only meant, perhaps, if this publishing business gets popular at all, people might wonder."
Holmes looked away, avoiding my eyes, but he did not let go of my hands. "What do I care what people think?"
I knelt, somewhat awkwardly, and forced him to meet my gaze. "Holmes, your name will be a household name. The royalties from my first novel are beginning to get ridiculous, and I'm not saying that as a boast. I was looking over my notes from that business with the Agra treasure, and I thought, what if I made a romance for myself in order to keep a little bit of attention off of us."
"More romance," Holmes scoffed. "You diluted the important, scientific matters with all that nonsense about A Study in Scarlet. The whole second half of the book wasn't even about me." I smirked. "Oh, stop it. The last thing your stories need is more romance."
I brought his hands to my lips and kissed his knuckles. He rolled his eyes. I turned his hands over and kissed the insides of his wrists, and he cupped my face to draw me up for a proper kiss.
When we parted, flushed and breathing somewhat heavier, I said, "I'm going to write to Mary and see what she says."
"I still don't think it's necessary," Holmes said, letting me go. "Who knows if you'll even get a second book published?"
I ignored him. It had been he who suggested I write down our adventures in the first place, and he who had been most encouraging in my search for an agent and publisher. He scoffed at my drafts and sneered at my elaboration of the plot, but in his bedroom I had found the Beeton's Christmas Annual in which the first story had appeared. He was secretly as eager for fame as I was, and I knew it.
Mary's reply came in the form of a visit. She turned up for tea a few days later with her own beau, a Miss Helen Waters. Mary and Helen went about like girlhood friends, though I knew they kept a small household together in Clapham. No one had ever made mention of it, and for that I was grateful.
"John," Mary said when they came up the stairs, taking my hand in both of hers. We kissed on the cheek, and she gave me a brilliant, mischievous smile. "I accept!"
Laughing, I led them into the sitting room. Holmes had deigned to put on a jacket for the sake of company, and was standing by the window, smoking a cigarette. He greeted the ladies warmly as well, and even kissed Mary's hand. Helen got the handshake she preferred, and we all sat down.
"I'm glad to hear it," I said, as I poured. I had insisted to Mrs Hudson that we wouldn't need help serving tea to our friends, mostly because I wanted our conversation to go unheard.
"I think it shall be very romantic," Mary said. She accepted her cup with delicate hands.
"You're not actually getting married," Holmes reminded us. "There will be no talk of guest lists or wedding gowns in this house."
"Thank God," Helen said. "I can barely stand to talk about day dresses."
Mary gave her companion a fond smile. "Which is why you leave it up to me. But no, we needn't go so far as to plan an actual fictional wedding. Will you woo me very long, John?"
"No," I said, "I think it will be a very quick romance. We were just so taken with each other, and I was so delighted that your treasure had been lost because I was a humble doctor and you were about to be a magnificently rich heiress."
"Wouldn't that have been nice," Mary said. It was true that the treasure had been lost, but it had not been I who benefitted from that absence of a change in fortune. She and Helen had found one another in an employment office a few years after the whole businesses, both looking for positions as governesses. Helen played the piano beautifully, though she liked to sing bawdy songs along with it when the company was right.
I pulled out the manuscript which I had started in the meantime, and offered it to her. "I think I shall add in a little bit about me comforting you in your time of trial, and perhaps we'll hold hands a few times."
Mary snorted, paging through and finding the places I had earmarked for romantic interludes. "It sounds perfect, John." She smiled at me. "Thank you for asking; I'm glad it wasn't a surprise, that's all. Who knows what Helen and Mr Holmes would have said if we'd gone and been married without their knowledge!"
"I would have been quite put out," Holmes said dryly. "Thank you for indulging his unquenchable thirst for a love story."
"My pleasure," Mary said. "And if, for some reason, you need to get rid of me so that you can move back in with him for the sake of your mysteries, I give you permission to kill me off."
"How kind of you," I said, planning to do nothing of the sort.
Four: After the Fall
When I returned from Switzerland, it was to a cold and empty house. I stood alone in the sitting room, blinded by my grief, uncertain as to how I'd even arrived there. It was exactly as we'd left it: books on tables, papers on the floor, his dressing gown draped over the back of his empty chair. The fireplace was cold and dark, and I could tell that Mrs Hudson had not been in to clean since we'd left. She was holiday, visiting her sister, I remembered. Wouldn't be home for days.
The bell rang downstairs. I shook myself, surprised by how dark it had become, and turned in a daze to answer it.
Mycroft Holmes stood on the other side of the door, his face deeply lined with sorrow. He took one look at me and said, "Oh, my dear fellow," in such a way that he sounded exactly like his brother. I turned away suddenly, ashamed at the way my eyes had filled with tears. I wouldn't weep, not in front of this man.
"Come upstairs, won't you?" I managed.
"No, thank you," he said. "I've just come to collect you."
I stared at him. "Collect me?"
"Doctor Watson, for your own sake, I have been instructed to escort you to the home of Miss Mary Morstan."
"Instructed by whom?" I demanded.
"By my brother," Mr Holmes said.
My throat closed up. I gasped like a fish, and Mr Holmes took me by the shoulder. "I will explain," he said. "Please, get into the coach. I will have your things sent over."
"No," I said, but I was powerless against him. He closed and locked the door behind me, and ushered me into the coach.
Mr Holmes settled his bulk across from me and laced his fingers together over his straining waistcoat. "My brother Sherlock was prepared for any eventuality," he said, as though this were a prepared speech. "During his increasingly frequent encounters with the Professor, it was his belief that this might be one possible end to the story."
I swallowed hard, thinking of the note in my pocket, and had to cover my mouth with my hand to maintain my composure.
"He left me with instructions, you see, that should you return to England without him, I was to immediately remove you from two twenty-one and see you off to 'your wife,' as he put it. She has been notified, and is awaiting your arrival."
I shook my head. Holmes had never really warmed up to that particular element of fiction, but now to think that he had considered it while he was making his plans… God, I wanted to strike him. If only he would come home to me.
The ride to Mary and Helen's was comparatively short, and I was deposited on their doorstep without much ceremony. Mr Holmes sat in his carriage long enough to see the front door open, and then he was away into the evening. Without a word, Mary enveloped me in a hug, pressing her cheek against my shoulder, and I sagged into her embrace like all my strings had been cut.
"Mary," I whispered, "what do I do?"
"You come inside," she said, pulling me in by the hand. "You get staggeringly drunk, and we go from there."
Staggeringly drunk was what I got. I vaguely remember Helen and Mary helping me to bed, and in the morning I wanted to weep all over again for the pounding in my head. But I didn't. I got up, I washed, and I drank as much water and tea as I could stand. I ate breakfast, telling myself I would never have to be bribed to eat like Holmes was, and I unpacked the suitcase that had been brought in the wee hours of the morning.
Mary insisted I should stay as long as I liked, and I told her that would be no longer than was necessary. I was grateful for their hospitality, but I knew the quickest route to recovery was activity. I would build my practice, finally, even though the dream I had once had of being a well-known, popular physician had long faded in the brilliant reality of being Holmes's companion.
The funeral was short and to the point. Without a body to bury, Mycroft had placed a small headstone in a family plot, and Holmes's name stood in for him beside the mother and father he had never bothered to mention. It left me hollowed out inside, too tired and sad to speak, and I sat long after the ceremony was over, my hand resting on the stone, letting its icy chill soak into my bones. Mary waited for me, sitting on a bench near the entrance to the cemetery, until the sun was nearly setting.
Then she put away her book, took me by the hand, and said, "Come home, John."
For three months I was her guest, and then at some point I was no longer a guest but a permanent resident. I was never the man of the house- Helen filled that role quite comfortably, and I never thought to challenge her on the matter- but as my practice began to lift itself off the ground, I was able to contribute to what had unexpectedly become my new household.
I wore an armband for him under my coat, refusing to take it off long after the mourning period for a friend would have been over. Mary and Helen never mentioned it if they saw it. I slept with it wrapped around my hand: it was the closest thing I had to something of Holmes's. I didn't go back to Baker Street. Mrs Hudson visited at Mary's, and we bumped into one another every so often, but I could tell she knew how painful it was to even think of returning. The only things Mycroft had delivered were my own belongings: my clothes, my books, my papers. It made me wonder, sometimes. I might have ended up with one or two of his shirts in my wardrobe, or his socks in my laundry, but not a single item of his had made the journey from Baker Street to Camberwell Street, and so I was left only with the single crepe band to crush between my fingers.
One such night, as I held the band to my lips and prayed for the strength to get up the next morning, I heard Mary and Helen laughing softly together in the room upstairs. I smiled, though it hurt, to hear them. Their lives had not been turned upside-down, as mine had, but they were friends as steadfast and true as a man could ask for, and I knew, in my heart, that they would be my guiding lights.
Five: With Translation
For two years, some considerable time after his sojourn to Europe without me, Holmes and I did not see one another. The ten years before that had been indescribable: Holmes had retired to the countryside and I had gone with him, and in the privacy of a cottage surrounded by trees we had lived in domestic and marital bliss. Not that retirement had changed Holmes, at all: he was still as brilliant and insufferable as ever. But the years softened his edges, and he responded to my most grievous sin, the purchase of an automobile, with only a roll of his eyes and a deep sigh of remorse.
Then there came a summons for Holmes and his particular talents, and he was spirited away to America. I moved back to London for a time, to keep busy with reviving my old practice, and awaited his irregular letters like the army wife I had always been warned against. They came to me more quickly in London: I didn't have to wait the extra day for them to make their way to Sussex. I was never allowed to write back.
The first letter I received, two months after he had left, was very short. It was written on a torn piece of paper, and I almost didn't recognize his handwriting. To think that he had changed so much about himself in order to go undetected that he would give up his strong script for this belaboured scrawl- it left me baffled. But I knew it was him, for the message was completely inane.
I cannot but think the truth about my sister: you see her every night and day.
For three days I puzzled over the letter, keeping it in my pocketbook and bringing it out when I had a quiet moment to peer at it once more. I knew it was a code, but it wasn't until I was walking past a butcher's shop one autumn afternoon and spotted pheasants hanging by their feet in the window. Hen pheasants.
The answer came to me at once, and I nearly tore the letter in my haste to get it open again.
I think about you every day.
I could have wept for joy. I had to blot the corners of my eyes with my sleeve, as it turned out, and my hands were shaking so hard I was worried I would drop the precious scrap. When I got back to the rooms in Queen Anne Street that I had taken temporarily, I tucked the letter away into the folder that held my dusty case notes, and I set to writing again. If I couldn't write to him, I could write for him.
The next few letters was much the same: a short, slightly nonsensical phrase that, with the application of a little intellectual force, rearranged itself into a simple, surprisingly romantic notion.
Miss Sullivan says you treat her dreadfully, said one.
Wish best for you, heard girls were contemplating coming here in order to try and keep family together. Me and whiskey: warm for now, read the one that arrived in February.
Then there was a break in the correspondence, and I worried all summer for him. The Continent was becoming increasingly more tumultuous, and I was glad at least that he was not infiltrating a secret society on that side of the water. The story of the time he tricked me into thinking he was dying was published that year, and I wondered if he knew I was scolding him from afar.
Mycroft Holmes assured me he was doing all right, and was having some success. I wished that was enough for my greedy heart.
My next letter, late in September, was instantly recognizable and entirely illegible. I laughed aloud when I opened it, delighted by my own befuddlement. He was using the pictograms of the dancing men. How he had remembered them, after all this time, was beyond me. I had to go digging into my old files to find the sheet of paper he had decoded, and it took me almost a week to get the whole message unraveled. Some of it I had to improvise, but I knew when I had got it right.
My dear boy, he'd written, excuse the silence. Things are darker than expected here, but I am beginning to see the dawn once more. I often think longingly of our cozy rooms, and you sitting across from me in your chair with a smile on your face. My work is as important as any I have done at home, but it does not feel so without you here as my conductor of light. My brother assures me you are well, but I look forward to seeing the truth of it with my own eyes again. Believe me to be, my dear fellow,
Very sincerely yours,
SH.
I folded the letter up and slept with it under my pillow. Once Holmes might have scoffed at my incorrigible sentiment, but we were getting old, and I had never given a damn. I loved him desperately. His letters were drops of water on parched lips. Even though he couldn't write like a normal person, I would have done anything at all to be allowed his correspondence.
It went on for several more months. I had to go seeking in my old notes for every letter, and I loved the quest. It made the words sweeter, knowing that he knew I would unscramble them.
Then, early in the year 1914, I received a letter that I almost dared not believe.
Thursday, it read, Paddington, 14.05. Altamont.
I went to the Diogenes Club, trembling all over. Mycroft saw me at once in the Stranger's room, and I showed him the note.
"No," he said, "there's no code here. I believe he's coming home, Doctor."
I felt all the tension of two years of anxiety drain out of me at once. I sank into a chair. "But what does it mean?" I asked.
Mycroft gave me a look over his half-moon glasses. "I believe he wants you to pick him up at the station in your infernal machine."
And one time he needed nothing at all.
The mornings in Sussex are quiet in a way that those at Baker Street had never been, even in the depths of winter when we were snug and cozy inside our four walls with the fire blazing. Waking up to the sound of the sea affects me in a way I will never be able to explain, but it soothes my soul and reminds me how lucky I am.
I have taken to long walks in the morning, clambering down the shifting cliffside to the beach despite the increasingly persistent ache in my old leg wound and the protestations of my other joints. Sometimes Holmes will join me, giving up the warmth of the bed we share for my continued companionship, and sometimes I leave him sleeping deeply, as though he is making up for his chronic abstinence in our youth.
Being close to the surf clears my head and prepares me for the day: breakfast, a bit of light reading, helping Holmes with the apiary, luncheon, a nap, perhaps another walk, then an early supper, some writing, and retiring once more to bed beside my friend. I smile to think of this sequence of events as my daily goings on, for once I was up at dawn risking my life every day for the good of the country, and later I was being roused by Holmes for the sake of a murder. We have had a few mysteries here and there since we retired, but nothing that requires the kind of physical exertion we used to thrive on. Now all Holmes wants is brainwork, and his bees, and me.
We live quite a ways from the village, which affords us the privacy we are due. The villagers know Mr Holmes is an eccentric, and they know I am a widower, and yet I still think they also know that we are partners in more than a crime-solving capacity.
Fortunately, I am now too old to give a rat's arse what they think, and Holmes has never been one to care overmuch about propriety. Mr Harold Stackhurst has dropped by more than once unannounced and interrupted a rather romantic interlude, and Holmes just smirks and displays his open collar while I blush and fidget and Stackhurst humours us both.
It was I, of course, who submitted the story of the Lion's Mane to my publisher, and I who added that nonsense about Holmes's and my estrangement. Though we are comfortably ensconced in our cottage out here, it wouldn't do for the denizens of London and my dear readers to become offended by our long-standing arrangement. Holmes agreed heartily to the charade, saying that he would rather the public think we had gone our separate ways so that he could have me at his side for ever.
One summer morning, after I had returned from my early walk on the beach and was sitting in my chair on the lawn reading a novel, I heard Holmes give a shout from the other end of the garden. I leapt to my feet and threw the novel aside, for that was where the bees were kept, and they had been irritable of late. Holmes suspected they were getting ready to swarm, and had spent the last week setting up a second hive some distance from the first one so that they would remain his bees, and not the bees of Sussex county.
I went hurrying down the garden path and saw Holmes coming from where the new hive was, ridding himself of his netted hat and, shockingly, the rest of his clothes. He was cursing and slapping at himself, and when he spotted me he cried, "Damn it, Watson, don't just stand there!"
I went to him and helped him undress there in the garden, down to his skin. He had been stung more than a dozen times, mostly on his hands and arms, but twice on the face and three times each on his torso and legs.
"The little buggers got me anywhere they could reach," he grumbled, and I took him by the arm to lead him back to the cottage, still stark naked. I wasn't wearing a jacket or anything that I could offer him, so I carried his clothes and shook them well as we walked. Holmes didn't bother to cover himself at all, and soon he began to chuckle at the sight we might have been: one respectable gentleman and one madman out for a stroll.
"Were you standing too close?" I asked, depositing him indoors. I dropped his clothes in a heap on the sofa and went to the kitchen cabinet for sodium bicarbonate.
"Yes," he said sheepishly. I returned with a bowl of water and poured the bicarbonate in, and he held still as I inspected the stings on his body for any sign of stingers. I found one on his arm and extracted it carefully with a pair of tweezers, mindful of the barbs, and then went about anointing him with the bicarbonate paste I had made. He winced and complained, but I gave him a kiss at the end to quiet him down.
"I'm glad I have you around, Watson," he said, once I had coaxed him back into his drawers. He had refused a shirt on the grounds that he was sore everywhere.
"I live to serve," I said, smiling. "I don't suppose the bees need supervision while they swarm, do they?"
"Apparently, they do not." He followed me back outside, and sat in my chair. I bent stiffly to pick up my novel, which I had managed to fling quite far, and glared at him sitting there. He only smiled.
"You need to stay in the shade," I said, "if you refuse to put your clothes back on. I'm not taking care of a sunburn on top of bee stings."
Holmes scoffed at that, but he did go in and get another chair, which he set just under the eaves of the cottage, out of the sun. Then he went in again at my directive and came back with ice chips wrapped in a towel, which he applied carefully to his face. He was already swelling at each of his puncture wounds, and his jaw was looking rather puffy.
"Did you get one inside your net?" I asked, touching his forehead tenderly.
"Yes," he said, and winced away from my fingers. "Well, no, I wasn't wearing the net, and I put it on too late."
"You idiot," I said fondly.
"I'm not an expert yet," said he. "I will be, you just wait. But the damn bees take too long to go about their business. If they would only work more quickly, I would understand them faster."
"You are not the master of nature," I said. "Perhaps it is good that you must bow to their pace."
He made a noise of annoyance and moved the ice to his forehead. "Damn their pace," he muttered.
I began to laugh, and laughed until the tears ran down my face and I was gasping for air. Holmes scowled at me the whole time I struggled to regain my breath, and every time he narrowed his eyes further I began snorting again in mirth. Finally, when Holmes had given up glaring and moved the ice again to his jaw, I quieted, weak with amusement.
"I love you," said I, patting his hand.
"Oh, shut up," he replied.
Read on A03: Here
Recipient: colebaltblue
Author: mistyzeo
Characters/Pairings: Holmes/Watson, side Mary/OFC
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None.
Summary: A brave man accepts help when it is offered. Five times Watson needed some help, and one time he needed nothing at all.
Notes: A thousand thanks to tweedisgood for beta reading and suggestions. We both know what trouble I have with the word "gotten."
Dear colebaltblue, happy holmestice. You mentioned a desire for a slice of life in whatever time period I enjoyed most, and I hope that I've given you six little slices that will amuse in ALL the time periods. I've played a little fast and loose with the details, but let's say it's an experiment and I look forward to seeing the results. :D Yours, this secret author.
One: In The Army
I will never forget the sound of the gunfire that horrible day. In my weak moments and my nightmares, it rattles through me, piercing my eardrums as easily as the bullets pierced my skin, and lodges in my brain as the shrapnel did into my muscle and bone. For a long time in London, even after I met Sherlock Holmes and we started sharing digs, I could not stand the sound of a metal-tipped cane on the pavement, nor the tumble of coins onto a countertop. Everything reminded me of the afternoon spent with blood on my hands, never certain if what I did was enough.
As a surgeon, I had not been expected to join the fray. The medics' tent was erected well back from the line of skirmish, and though our supplies were running low and there was no clean water to be had, I remember being determined to make the best of it. My assistant, Mr Murray, was at my side, constantly running to and fro for tools, fresh bandages, water, more water. When the fighting began, I steeled myself for the worst. I would lose patients, I told myself, but I had to keep the number as low as I humanly could.
It went on all afternoon. It was the middle of July, and though the tent kept off the worst of the sun, the air was thick with heat and sand, and sweat ran in my eyes. Murray and I worked frantically as the casualties began to rack up, brought to us on stretchers and on foot, and often left lying there by the tent, as if their bearers hoped they'd be able to get up and walk the last few feet once we had a bench free. The Afghans had a couple of modern Armstrong guns, and the effect of these was devastating.
My hands were stiff with blood. There weren't enough bandages to staunch all the bleeding, and I began to tear apart the uniforms off the men's own bodies to bind their wounds. I sewed flesh like a man possessed, and tore suture thread with my teeth. I took off limbs like they were nothing, expendable, and ruined many a life even as I saved it.
To make a long story short, the Ghazi attack collapsed the 66th Regiment like wet paper, and suddenly what should have been this place of refuge behind the lines was surrounded. The gunfire was too loud, too close, and the man under my hands began to scream. My left shoulder exploded with pain. I fell to the ground, the world going dark for a moment before I recovered my senses. Blood poured down my arm, and it took me three tries to get up. When I did, I stumbled back to my table as though I could go on doing what I had been doing. The soldier had fainted. I was near to doing the same myself.
I heard Murray's voice as though from a long way off, and I turned towards the sound, in a daze.
"Sir!" he was calling. "Doctor Watson!" Then close to me, just at my ear, bawling over the noise of guns, "You've been hit, sir; we need to move out!"
I remember saying, "I can't," but he shook his head and began to lead me away.
"Sir, the medics will move them. We just need to fall back, sir, come on, there you go." He was encouraging me as one would a child taking reluctant steps, and I knew I was going into shock. I could feel my body temperature dropping and my hand and legs beginning to shake.
"Just a little farther, sir," Murray was saying when the second bullet tore into my thigh. I collapsed, and for a long time I was in a dark haze, aware only of the pain and the blood I was losing.
Truth be told, I was lucky. Murray had enough sense to be leading me towards a mule train, and when I went down he said he lifted me onto the back of one of the poor, frightened animals. He was with me when I awoke, a day later and a few pints of blood shorter.
He said I asked him how he did, though I don't remember that first awakening. He hadn't suffered a scratch, thank God, and had kept us abreast of the retreat at all times, so that the moment we reached a field hospital I was on a stretcher and under the knife. The next time I was conscious, he told me he had assisted in the operation, and he didn't need to add that he was the reason I was alive. I knew that right away.
Mr Murray was given a medal of honour for assisting an officer under fire, and I was given a discharge. I don't hold it against him for a moment; both were well deserved. I suspect they had decided to discharge me even before I fell victim to the fever that had me lying in hospital for three weeks, but I didn't receive it until afterwards.
I suspect Murray had something to do with that, too.
Two: With The Rent
The day had started out so promising. It was a beautiful spring morning, my leg was no longer aching in the cold grip of winter, and I had collected my pension. A modest list of accomplishments, I thought, but worth notice in my newly simple life. I had much to be grateful for-my life, my liberty, and my returning health among them- and I was determined to be thankful for every little thing that day.
With a comfortably full pocket book I set off for home, intending to hand over my half of the month's rent immediately. I knew full well what I might be capable of if left to my own devices and the promise of a few fast horses. The rent wasn't due for another week, but I thought better to put it away early than risk losing it.
My intentions were good, but because of the splendid day and the renewed strength in my bad leg I chose to walk back to Baker Street, rather than take a cab. Why spend money today of all days? I was flush with it, and I meant to save it for important things. I had my eye on a fine pen and inkwell set for my desk, newly installed by the window in the sitting room. I could treat Holmes to a trip to the opera. I could put a little away into savings, and perhaps someday I would start my own practice.
As I walked, humming to myself, nodding to young ladies, tapping my cane upon the ground, I discovered I was not heading for Baker Street at all, but for my club. I had not been a member for long- upon Stamford's recommendation I was accepted, which was the least in an extensive line of favours Stamford had done me- and so I looked forward to socializing a while with my new companions.
The club was quiet when I entered, but there was a game of cards going on at a table in the card room, and two fellows about my age were playing billiards in the room adjoining. I watched them for a while, making small talk, and then moved on to the card game. One of the players was in the process of abandoning his seat, protesting that he must be getting on, had to finish the errands his wife had sent him on, lest she begin to worry. His friends- my soon-to-be downfall- teased him good-naturedly and bid him farewell, and turned right around to welcome me to the table.
I couldn't turn them down. I had found exactly what I'd been looking for, and I was never a man to ignore the lure of a friendly wager.
A friendly wager it was not. Within an hour I had lost the majority of my month's pay, and with it all the dreams I had entertained on my walk from the army office. Gone was the new ink well, gone was the trip to the opera, and, most painfully, gone was the imaginary office with my name on the door which I had already begun to populate with imaginary patients.
I signed over my pension cheque with a heavy heart (and a very false laugh), and departed from the club immediately. Now my walk to Baker Street was compulsory, and every cab that rattled past was a taunt. I reached the front door of 221 too quickly, having not yet come up with a plan of action. I was broke. I unlocked the door.
Every step I climbed was torture. My stomach actually hurt, I was so worried. Holmes would toss me out on my ear for certain. I had not yet ascertained exactly what his profession was, but he would not have been looking to share rooms if it was very lucrative. Nor would he have accepted me as a room mate if he had known what a failure I was. I dreaded what I had to do.
To my relief and horror, he was not in the sitting room when I entered. The former, because I would not have to face my fate immediately; the latter for the very same reason.
I did not have to wait long. In fact, I had only just hung up my hat when he burst from his bedroom, arms spread in what must have been triumph.
"Watson!" he cried, his face lit up with pleasure. "You're back. What a splendid afternoon it is, isn't it?" He shook me by the hand with great enthusiasm, and it sent my teeth rattling in my head. "Oh, I've just had the most magnificent visitor; I wish you'd been here."
"Oh," I said, dazed. "Was she very beautiful?"
Holmes barked a laugh. "Ha! Watson, your pawky sense of humour will get the better of you one of these days." Not my sense of humour, I thought. "No, it was a gentlemen with a splendid little puzzle- why, Watson." He stopped suddenly, staring into my face. "Whatever is the matter? Sit down, my dear fellow; you look awful. Are you in pain?"
"Holmes," I said, resisting his attempts to lead me to the armchair by the fireplace. "I'm afraid I have to beg you for a favour."
"Please do," Holmes said, and let go of my arm. He was still looking at me intently, his brows furrowed. As I tried to think of a tactful way to either ask him to cover my half of the rent this month, or even to admit that I had lost all my money in one fell swoop, his expression cleared and the corner of his mouth twitched. "You picked up your pension today," he said. "You left the house this morning in a fine state, but you've returned quite low. Was it the horses again, my dear boy, or something else? Cards? It was cards."
"Oh," I breathed, "how ever did you guess?"
"I don't guess," Holmes said firmly. "You have a habit, it's not hard to tell: your rather thin cheque book gives you away, along with the list of sums I have sometimes spied when you leave your journal open on your desk, and your thrice pawned pocket watch."
I blinked at him. I had not pawned my pocket watch, but that was another matter.
"And," he went on, "you have a general odour of tobacco upon you which is not your own, which leads me to believe you have stopped in at your new club."
The man was a marvel. I had almost forgotten my dilemma; how could he know so much about me?! But the mention of the club brought it all back, and my look of wonder must have crumpled.
"Yes," I said. "I didn't mean to."
"Of course not," Holmes said briskly. "But I must say that if you intend to continue living here, we must come to an agreement."
I flushed a miserable, embarrassed red.
Holmes held out his hand. "Give me your cheque book. I will lock it in my desk."
"Holmes!"
"The only way to cure you of your ills is to deprive you of them entirely." Holmes brandished his open palm, and I fished my cheque book out of my pocket. I hesitated in handing it to him, so he snatched it away. "I will give it to you if you ask," he said, putting it away in the drawer and turning the key, "but that will be the deterrent. As for the rent, my recent visitor will take care of that. Chin up, Watson."
I took a deep breath, and obeyed.
Three: With the Public
"Holmes," I said, struck with an idea, "what if I were to get married?"
"Not to me, I hope," he said, not looking up from his bench which turned our sitting room into a laboratory. He was working on a particularly pungent experiment, and I had opened all the windows in an attempt to keep the place liveable. "I would make a decidedly unsatisfactory housewife."
"Not literally married," I said, smiling.
"Figuratively married?"
"Fictionally married."
He looked up then, frowning at me from across the room. "Why ever would you do that?"
"How long have we been… together?"
Holmes raised an eyebrow. "Living together, or together together?"
I shrugged.
"What year is it?"
I laughed. "1890," I said, amazed. "You don't mean to tell me you don't-"
"Nearly ten years," he said. "As to the second, seven years, six months, twenty four days."
I blinked. He wasn't the sort of man to remember birthdays or bank holidays. I hadn't expected him to know the length of our affair down to the day. Then again, who knew what sort of information he deemed important for his lumber room of a brain. Apparently that counted. I blushed.
"Well," I said, fumbling now, caught off guard by his sentimentality, "isn't it strange that we've lived together ten years, and neither of us has made any sort of move towards a wife or a family?"
Holmes put his chemical instruments down and sighed. "It isn't strange to me," he said, and I could hear the hurt in his voice. "But if you think it's strange, then by all means, go get married."
Damn. I hadn't meant to make him cross. I got up from my desk and went to him, and he let me take his hands in mine. "I didn't mean that," I said, "I only meant, perhaps, if this publishing business gets popular at all, people might wonder."
Holmes looked away, avoiding my eyes, but he did not let go of my hands. "What do I care what people think?"
I knelt, somewhat awkwardly, and forced him to meet my gaze. "Holmes, your name will be a household name. The royalties from my first novel are beginning to get ridiculous, and I'm not saying that as a boast. I was looking over my notes from that business with the Agra treasure, and I thought, what if I made a romance for myself in order to keep a little bit of attention off of us."
"More romance," Holmes scoffed. "You diluted the important, scientific matters with all that nonsense about A Study in Scarlet. The whole second half of the book wasn't even about me." I smirked. "Oh, stop it. The last thing your stories need is more romance."
I brought his hands to my lips and kissed his knuckles. He rolled his eyes. I turned his hands over and kissed the insides of his wrists, and he cupped my face to draw me up for a proper kiss.
When we parted, flushed and breathing somewhat heavier, I said, "I'm going to write to Mary and see what she says."
"I still don't think it's necessary," Holmes said, letting me go. "Who knows if you'll even get a second book published?"
I ignored him. It had been he who suggested I write down our adventures in the first place, and he who had been most encouraging in my search for an agent and publisher. He scoffed at my drafts and sneered at my elaboration of the plot, but in his bedroom I had found the Beeton's Christmas Annual in which the first story had appeared. He was secretly as eager for fame as I was, and I knew it.
Mary's reply came in the form of a visit. She turned up for tea a few days later with her own beau, a Miss Helen Waters. Mary and Helen went about like girlhood friends, though I knew they kept a small household together in Clapham. No one had ever made mention of it, and for that I was grateful.
"John," Mary said when they came up the stairs, taking my hand in both of hers. We kissed on the cheek, and she gave me a brilliant, mischievous smile. "I accept!"
Laughing, I led them into the sitting room. Holmes had deigned to put on a jacket for the sake of company, and was standing by the window, smoking a cigarette. He greeted the ladies warmly as well, and even kissed Mary's hand. Helen got the handshake she preferred, and we all sat down.
"I'm glad to hear it," I said, as I poured. I had insisted to Mrs Hudson that we wouldn't need help serving tea to our friends, mostly because I wanted our conversation to go unheard.
"I think it shall be very romantic," Mary said. She accepted her cup with delicate hands.
"You're not actually getting married," Holmes reminded us. "There will be no talk of guest lists or wedding gowns in this house."
"Thank God," Helen said. "I can barely stand to talk about day dresses."
Mary gave her companion a fond smile. "Which is why you leave it up to me. But no, we needn't go so far as to plan an actual fictional wedding. Will you woo me very long, John?"
"No," I said, "I think it will be a very quick romance. We were just so taken with each other, and I was so delighted that your treasure had been lost because I was a humble doctor and you were about to be a magnificently rich heiress."
"Wouldn't that have been nice," Mary said. It was true that the treasure had been lost, but it had not been I who benefitted from that absence of a change in fortune. She and Helen had found one another in an employment office a few years after the whole businesses, both looking for positions as governesses. Helen played the piano beautifully, though she liked to sing bawdy songs along with it when the company was right.
I pulled out the manuscript which I had started in the meantime, and offered it to her. "I think I shall add in a little bit about me comforting you in your time of trial, and perhaps we'll hold hands a few times."
Mary snorted, paging through and finding the places I had earmarked for romantic interludes. "It sounds perfect, John." She smiled at me. "Thank you for asking; I'm glad it wasn't a surprise, that's all. Who knows what Helen and Mr Holmes would have said if we'd gone and been married without their knowledge!"
"I would have been quite put out," Holmes said dryly. "Thank you for indulging his unquenchable thirst for a love story."
"My pleasure," Mary said. "And if, for some reason, you need to get rid of me so that you can move back in with him for the sake of your mysteries, I give you permission to kill me off."
"How kind of you," I said, planning to do nothing of the sort.
Four: After the Fall
When I returned from Switzerland, it was to a cold and empty house. I stood alone in the sitting room, blinded by my grief, uncertain as to how I'd even arrived there. It was exactly as we'd left it: books on tables, papers on the floor, his dressing gown draped over the back of his empty chair. The fireplace was cold and dark, and I could tell that Mrs Hudson had not been in to clean since we'd left. She was holiday, visiting her sister, I remembered. Wouldn't be home for days.
The bell rang downstairs. I shook myself, surprised by how dark it had become, and turned in a daze to answer it.
Mycroft Holmes stood on the other side of the door, his face deeply lined with sorrow. He took one look at me and said, "Oh, my dear fellow," in such a way that he sounded exactly like his brother. I turned away suddenly, ashamed at the way my eyes had filled with tears. I wouldn't weep, not in front of this man.
"Come upstairs, won't you?" I managed.
"No, thank you," he said. "I've just come to collect you."
I stared at him. "Collect me?"
"Doctor Watson, for your own sake, I have been instructed to escort you to the home of Miss Mary Morstan."
"Instructed by whom?" I demanded.
"By my brother," Mr Holmes said.
My throat closed up. I gasped like a fish, and Mr Holmes took me by the shoulder. "I will explain," he said. "Please, get into the coach. I will have your things sent over."
"No," I said, but I was powerless against him. He closed and locked the door behind me, and ushered me into the coach.
Mr Holmes settled his bulk across from me and laced his fingers together over his straining waistcoat. "My brother Sherlock was prepared for any eventuality," he said, as though this were a prepared speech. "During his increasingly frequent encounters with the Professor, it was his belief that this might be one possible end to the story."
I swallowed hard, thinking of the note in my pocket, and had to cover my mouth with my hand to maintain my composure.
"He left me with instructions, you see, that should you return to England without him, I was to immediately remove you from two twenty-one and see you off to 'your wife,' as he put it. She has been notified, and is awaiting your arrival."
I shook my head. Holmes had never really warmed up to that particular element of fiction, but now to think that he had considered it while he was making his plans… God, I wanted to strike him. If only he would come home to me.
The ride to Mary and Helen's was comparatively short, and I was deposited on their doorstep without much ceremony. Mr Holmes sat in his carriage long enough to see the front door open, and then he was away into the evening. Without a word, Mary enveloped me in a hug, pressing her cheek against my shoulder, and I sagged into her embrace like all my strings had been cut.
"Mary," I whispered, "what do I do?"
"You come inside," she said, pulling me in by the hand. "You get staggeringly drunk, and we go from there."
Staggeringly drunk was what I got. I vaguely remember Helen and Mary helping me to bed, and in the morning I wanted to weep all over again for the pounding in my head. But I didn't. I got up, I washed, and I drank as much water and tea as I could stand. I ate breakfast, telling myself I would never have to be bribed to eat like Holmes was, and I unpacked the suitcase that had been brought in the wee hours of the morning.
Mary insisted I should stay as long as I liked, and I told her that would be no longer than was necessary. I was grateful for their hospitality, but I knew the quickest route to recovery was activity. I would build my practice, finally, even though the dream I had once had of being a well-known, popular physician had long faded in the brilliant reality of being Holmes's companion.
The funeral was short and to the point. Without a body to bury, Mycroft had placed a small headstone in a family plot, and Holmes's name stood in for him beside the mother and father he had never bothered to mention. It left me hollowed out inside, too tired and sad to speak, and I sat long after the ceremony was over, my hand resting on the stone, letting its icy chill soak into my bones. Mary waited for me, sitting on a bench near the entrance to the cemetery, until the sun was nearly setting.
Then she put away her book, took me by the hand, and said, "Come home, John."
For three months I was her guest, and then at some point I was no longer a guest but a permanent resident. I was never the man of the house- Helen filled that role quite comfortably, and I never thought to challenge her on the matter- but as my practice began to lift itself off the ground, I was able to contribute to what had unexpectedly become my new household.
I wore an armband for him under my coat, refusing to take it off long after the mourning period for a friend would have been over. Mary and Helen never mentioned it if they saw it. I slept with it wrapped around my hand: it was the closest thing I had to something of Holmes's. I didn't go back to Baker Street. Mrs Hudson visited at Mary's, and we bumped into one another every so often, but I could tell she knew how painful it was to even think of returning. The only things Mycroft had delivered were my own belongings: my clothes, my books, my papers. It made me wonder, sometimes. I might have ended up with one or two of his shirts in my wardrobe, or his socks in my laundry, but not a single item of his had made the journey from Baker Street to Camberwell Street, and so I was left only with the single crepe band to crush between my fingers.
One such night, as I held the band to my lips and prayed for the strength to get up the next morning, I heard Mary and Helen laughing softly together in the room upstairs. I smiled, though it hurt, to hear them. Their lives had not been turned upside-down, as mine had, but they were friends as steadfast and true as a man could ask for, and I knew, in my heart, that they would be my guiding lights.
Five: With Translation
For two years, some considerable time after his sojourn to Europe without me, Holmes and I did not see one another. The ten years before that had been indescribable: Holmes had retired to the countryside and I had gone with him, and in the privacy of a cottage surrounded by trees we had lived in domestic and marital bliss. Not that retirement had changed Holmes, at all: he was still as brilliant and insufferable as ever. But the years softened his edges, and he responded to my most grievous sin, the purchase of an automobile, with only a roll of his eyes and a deep sigh of remorse.
Then there came a summons for Holmes and his particular talents, and he was spirited away to America. I moved back to London for a time, to keep busy with reviving my old practice, and awaited his irregular letters like the army wife I had always been warned against. They came to me more quickly in London: I didn't have to wait the extra day for them to make their way to Sussex. I was never allowed to write back.
The first letter I received, two months after he had left, was very short. It was written on a torn piece of paper, and I almost didn't recognize his handwriting. To think that he had changed so much about himself in order to go undetected that he would give up his strong script for this belaboured scrawl- it left me baffled. But I knew it was him, for the message was completely inane.
I cannot but think the truth about my sister: you see her every night and day.
For three days I puzzled over the letter, keeping it in my pocketbook and bringing it out when I had a quiet moment to peer at it once more. I knew it was a code, but it wasn't until I was walking past a butcher's shop one autumn afternoon and spotted pheasants hanging by their feet in the window. Hen pheasants.
The answer came to me at once, and I nearly tore the letter in my haste to get it open again.
I think about you every day.
I could have wept for joy. I had to blot the corners of my eyes with my sleeve, as it turned out, and my hands were shaking so hard I was worried I would drop the precious scrap. When I got back to the rooms in Queen Anne Street that I had taken temporarily, I tucked the letter away into the folder that held my dusty case notes, and I set to writing again. If I couldn't write to him, I could write for him.
The next few letters was much the same: a short, slightly nonsensical phrase that, with the application of a little intellectual force, rearranged itself into a simple, surprisingly romantic notion.
Miss Sullivan says you treat her dreadfully, said one.
Wish best for you, heard girls were contemplating coming here in order to try and keep family together. Me and whiskey: warm for now, read the one that arrived in February.
Then there was a break in the correspondence, and I worried all summer for him. The Continent was becoming increasingly more tumultuous, and I was glad at least that he was not infiltrating a secret society on that side of the water. The story of the time he tricked me into thinking he was dying was published that year, and I wondered if he knew I was scolding him from afar.
Mycroft Holmes assured me he was doing all right, and was having some success. I wished that was enough for my greedy heart.
My next letter, late in September, was instantly recognizable and entirely illegible. I laughed aloud when I opened it, delighted by my own befuddlement. He was using the pictograms of the dancing men. How he had remembered them, after all this time, was beyond me. I had to go digging into my old files to find the sheet of paper he had decoded, and it took me almost a week to get the whole message unraveled. Some of it I had to improvise, but I knew when I had got it right.
My dear boy, he'd written, excuse the silence. Things are darker than expected here, but I am beginning to see the dawn once more. I often think longingly of our cozy rooms, and you sitting across from me in your chair with a smile on your face. My work is as important as any I have done at home, but it does not feel so without you here as my conductor of light. My brother assures me you are well, but I look forward to seeing the truth of it with my own eyes again. Believe me to be, my dear fellow,
Very sincerely yours,
SH.
I folded the letter up and slept with it under my pillow. Once Holmes might have scoffed at my incorrigible sentiment, but we were getting old, and I had never given a damn. I loved him desperately. His letters were drops of water on parched lips. Even though he couldn't write like a normal person, I would have done anything at all to be allowed his correspondence.
It went on for several more months. I had to go seeking in my old notes for every letter, and I loved the quest. It made the words sweeter, knowing that he knew I would unscramble them.
Then, early in the year 1914, I received a letter that I almost dared not believe.
Thursday, it read, Paddington, 14.05. Altamont.
I went to the Diogenes Club, trembling all over. Mycroft saw me at once in the Stranger's room, and I showed him the note.
"No," he said, "there's no code here. I believe he's coming home, Doctor."
I felt all the tension of two years of anxiety drain out of me at once. I sank into a chair. "But what does it mean?" I asked.
Mycroft gave me a look over his half-moon glasses. "I believe he wants you to pick him up at the station in your infernal machine."
And one time he needed nothing at all.
The mornings in Sussex are quiet in a way that those at Baker Street had never been, even in the depths of winter when we were snug and cozy inside our four walls with the fire blazing. Waking up to the sound of the sea affects me in a way I will never be able to explain, but it soothes my soul and reminds me how lucky I am.
I have taken to long walks in the morning, clambering down the shifting cliffside to the beach despite the increasingly persistent ache in my old leg wound and the protestations of my other joints. Sometimes Holmes will join me, giving up the warmth of the bed we share for my continued companionship, and sometimes I leave him sleeping deeply, as though he is making up for his chronic abstinence in our youth.
Being close to the surf clears my head and prepares me for the day: breakfast, a bit of light reading, helping Holmes with the apiary, luncheon, a nap, perhaps another walk, then an early supper, some writing, and retiring once more to bed beside my friend. I smile to think of this sequence of events as my daily goings on, for once I was up at dawn risking my life every day for the good of the country, and later I was being roused by Holmes for the sake of a murder. We have had a few mysteries here and there since we retired, but nothing that requires the kind of physical exertion we used to thrive on. Now all Holmes wants is brainwork, and his bees, and me.
We live quite a ways from the village, which affords us the privacy we are due. The villagers know Mr Holmes is an eccentric, and they know I am a widower, and yet I still think they also know that we are partners in more than a crime-solving capacity.
Fortunately, I am now too old to give a rat's arse what they think, and Holmes has never been one to care overmuch about propriety. Mr Harold Stackhurst has dropped by more than once unannounced and interrupted a rather romantic interlude, and Holmes just smirks and displays his open collar while I blush and fidget and Stackhurst humours us both.
It was I, of course, who submitted the story of the Lion's Mane to my publisher, and I who added that nonsense about Holmes's and my estrangement. Though we are comfortably ensconced in our cottage out here, it wouldn't do for the denizens of London and my dear readers to become offended by our long-standing arrangement. Holmes agreed heartily to the charade, saying that he would rather the public think we had gone our separate ways so that he could have me at his side for ever.
One summer morning, after I had returned from my early walk on the beach and was sitting in my chair on the lawn reading a novel, I heard Holmes give a shout from the other end of the garden. I leapt to my feet and threw the novel aside, for that was where the bees were kept, and they had been irritable of late. Holmes suspected they were getting ready to swarm, and had spent the last week setting up a second hive some distance from the first one so that they would remain his bees, and not the bees of Sussex county.
I went hurrying down the garden path and saw Holmes coming from where the new hive was, ridding himself of his netted hat and, shockingly, the rest of his clothes. He was cursing and slapping at himself, and when he spotted me he cried, "Damn it, Watson, don't just stand there!"
I went to him and helped him undress there in the garden, down to his skin. He had been stung more than a dozen times, mostly on his hands and arms, but twice on the face and three times each on his torso and legs.
"The little buggers got me anywhere they could reach," he grumbled, and I took him by the arm to lead him back to the cottage, still stark naked. I wasn't wearing a jacket or anything that I could offer him, so I carried his clothes and shook them well as we walked. Holmes didn't bother to cover himself at all, and soon he began to chuckle at the sight we might have been: one respectable gentleman and one madman out for a stroll.
"Were you standing too close?" I asked, depositing him indoors. I dropped his clothes in a heap on the sofa and went to the kitchen cabinet for sodium bicarbonate.
"Yes," he said sheepishly. I returned with a bowl of water and poured the bicarbonate in, and he held still as I inspected the stings on his body for any sign of stingers. I found one on his arm and extracted it carefully with a pair of tweezers, mindful of the barbs, and then went about anointing him with the bicarbonate paste I had made. He winced and complained, but I gave him a kiss at the end to quiet him down.
"I'm glad I have you around, Watson," he said, once I had coaxed him back into his drawers. He had refused a shirt on the grounds that he was sore everywhere.
"I live to serve," I said, smiling. "I don't suppose the bees need supervision while they swarm, do they?"
"Apparently, they do not." He followed me back outside, and sat in my chair. I bent stiffly to pick up my novel, which I had managed to fling quite far, and glared at him sitting there. He only smiled.
"You need to stay in the shade," I said, "if you refuse to put your clothes back on. I'm not taking care of a sunburn on top of bee stings."
Holmes scoffed at that, but he did go in and get another chair, which he set just under the eaves of the cottage, out of the sun. Then he went in again at my directive and came back with ice chips wrapped in a towel, which he applied carefully to his face. He was already swelling at each of his puncture wounds, and his jaw was looking rather puffy.
"Did you get one inside your net?" I asked, touching his forehead tenderly.
"Yes," he said, and winced away from my fingers. "Well, no, I wasn't wearing the net, and I put it on too late."
"You idiot," I said fondly.
"I'm not an expert yet," said he. "I will be, you just wait. But the damn bees take too long to go about their business. If they would only work more quickly, I would understand them faster."
"You are not the master of nature," I said. "Perhaps it is good that you must bow to their pace."
He made a noise of annoyance and moved the ice to his forehead. "Damn their pace," he muttered.
I began to laugh, and laughed until the tears ran down my face and I was gasping for air. Holmes scowled at me the whole time I struggled to regain my breath, and every time he narrowed his eyes further I began snorting again in mirth. Finally, when Holmes had given up glaring and moved the ice again to his jaw, I quieted, weak with amusement.
"I love you," said I, patting his hand.
"Oh, shut up," he replied.