Fic for amindamazed: The Persistence of Memory
Title: The Persistence of Memory
Recipient: amindamazed
Author: sanguinity
Fandoms: Elementary; Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century
Characters/Pairings: Joan Watson & Sherlock Holmes
Rating: Mature
Warnings: off-screen major character deaths, mentions of drug use
Summary: It was 2198, and everyone Joan Watson knew was dead. Everyone except Sherlock Holmes.
Tags: AU, crack, hurt/comfort, angst, unhappy endings
Words: approx 8,000
Author Notes:
Elementary spoilers through 2x22 "Paint it Black," divergent thereafter.
Presumes no prior knowledge of Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, and spoilers are limited largely to 1x01 "The Fall and Rise of Sherlock Holmes." However, this story is a major break from that show’s tone; please heed the warnings and tags.
Major thanks to my betas, grrlpup and beanarie, who held my hand every step of the way. All remaining faults with the story are my own.
Sherlock's voice shook with tension. "Can you hear me? I need you to open your eyes for me." There was firm pressure on the inside of Joan’s wrist: he was monitoring her pulse. "Open your eyes. Open your eyes, please."
Joan opened her eyes. She winced away from the brightness of the light; Sherlock’s silhouette immediately shifted position to shade her from it.
It took a moment to focus on his face-he was very close-and when she did, he looked younger than he ought. His skin was softer, smoother. Visual aura, she thought, and wondered if she had a head injury.
Sherlock was examining her face, concentrating every ounce of attention he had on her. His breathing was ragged. "It's all right," she reassured him. She was still groping for context; his anxiety clearly indicated that the larger context, whatever it was, was very far from alright. But whatever was going on, she didn’t seem to be seriously injured, and neither was he, which meant that at a fundamental level things were all right. She reversed his grip on her wrist and squeezed his hand in hers. "I'm alright." She held his gaze, letting him assure himself of whatever he needed to know.
She still didn't know where she was, or why she had been unconscious, but except for the fact that he appeared too young-and that was a puzzling neurological symptom-she felt far better than his anxiety suggested she should. Her calmness might also be a symptom. She tried to look past him. He was taking up most of her field of vision-
-she had only seen that much hair on him in photos from his youth. She frowned.
"Watson," he breathed. The tension in his frame eased slightly.
There was the grinding of servo motors nearby. "Holmes." The voice was British, male, and had mechanical overtones. "How may I assist?"
Irritation swept over Sherlock's face, and he jerked to look over his shoulder. The movement revealed a large, metallic humanoid figure with an uncannily human face standing behind him, leaning over them both.
It peered through a monocle at her. "My bio-med scanners detect an elevated heart rate, but otherwise, all physiological responses-"
"Yes, thank you," Sherlock said, impatiently gesturing it away. "We need some privacy, if you don't mind."
The figure's mustache and muttonchops drooped in hurt, but he showed no resentment of Sherlock's rudeness. "Yes, of course. I shall be just over here when you need me." The figure clanked as it moved away.
"What was that?" Joan asked, feeling, for the first time since she woke, slightly panicked.
"A compudroid," Sherlock answered, returning his attention to her. "Never mind that just now. How old are you? And what year is it?"
"2014,” she said, and did some arithmetic. “Forty-three."
He let out an explosive breath and shut his eyes, clutching her hand tightly.
"Sherlock, what's happening?"
“Watson, I’m sorry,” he whispered.
His hairline was enormously distracting. It had receded slightly over the time that they had known each other, but she had never seen it as low as this. "Why do you have so much hair?" She tried to lift her free hand to touch it. Something checked her movement.
"Let me get these,” he said, half-panicked, and then it was as if a dam had broken. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Watson," he repeated, as he fumbled one-handed to undo the restraints that held her down. He never let go of her other hand.
"Sherlock," she insisted, "talk to me."
He freed the last buckle, and took a deep breath. "You were abducted in the year 2014,” he said, and her eyebrows went up at the suggestion that it was no longer 2014. “I searched for you, but I never found you, nor any conclusive evidence of what became of you. I eventually came to suspect my brother and MI6, but... I searched for decades, Watson." Sherlock clearly believed what he was saying. However ludicrous the implied dates of his story, the pain in his eyes was real.
She took his other hand to steady him. He gripped it as tightly as the first. “Go on,” she urged, needing more data on his mental state, “when is it now?”
"It is now the year 2198. Yes, I know, Watson, I know. Gareth Lestrade's great-granddaughter had my body reanimated and rejuvenated when a clone of Moriarty started terrorizing New-" He gave an exasperated breath. "No. It's a long story, and it doesn't matter just now. The important part is that I've found you. And you're alive."
Joan searched Sherlock’s eyes; he was in perfect earnest. “You realize you’re not making a lot of sense right now.”
“I realize, yes. But we’re in what is supposed to be a secure government facility, and we don’t have a lot of time. Can you sit up? Can you walk?”
He stepped back to give her space, but a wave of lightheadedness attacked her when she sat up. He crowded close again, and she held up a hand. “Just dizzy. I’ll be fine in a moment.”
There was the noise of servos and clanking, and the mechanical man said from beside them, “Holmes, I have taken the liberty of calling Inspector Lestrade. Madam, I can carry you, if you are still feeling unwell? It would be no trouble at all.” His monocle and muttonchops were faintly ridiculous, but his expression was painfully honest in its helpfulness.
She was getting flashes of memory: black SUVs and government helicopters, gunshots and zipties and being too drug-addled to track what was happening to her. She was finished with being in other people’s control. “I can walk, thanks.” Even if she couldn’t walk, she would still walk somehow. She looked to Sherlock. “Could I get some clothes?” For some reason, she was wearing a skintight silver jumpsuit.
Sherlock shrugged out of his peacoat and placed it around her shoulders. She had a flash of Marchef doing the same to her in a dark warehouse, and she shied from his touch, just as Sherlock’s scent rose from the heavy fabric to surround her, homelike and comforting. He abruptly pulled his hands away, biting his lip. “When we get home, we’ll get you something else,” he said. “I’ll send-” his eyes flicked to the mechanical man standing near them, “him out for some. But for your peace of mind, your costume is not as outré as you imagine it to be.”
“Holmes is correct,” the machine said, “but I would be pleased to procure something that is more to your liking when we are in a safer location.”
Joan’s eyes flicked between Sherlock and the metal man. Sherlock was keeping something back from her, and she didn’t like it. But the list of things that she didn’t like was a mile long and was currently topped by the eerie sea of glassed-in coffins that surrounded them, each with its own panel of gently pulsing colored lights. Leaving was a priority; sorting out whatever was going on with Sherlock could wait.
She slid off the table and onto her feet. Sherlock brought a hand to her elbow to steady her, as he scanned the far reaches of the room. His hand pressed at Joan’s elbow. “This way.”
An evil cackle echoed across the room. Both men, metal and flesh, froze.
“It’s Fenwick!” the robot said.
“I heard, yes,” Sherlock snapped, and then both man and robot closed around her to hustle her toward an exit.
The corridor on the other side of the doors was generic industrial. Sherlock chose a door set into an alcove two-thirds along the hallway, surveyed it, and then looked to the robot. “Would you do the honors?”
“Of course,” it answered, going to one knee before the service panel set beside the door. It opened a compartment in its belly and drew out a series of tools, applying them in turn to the mechanism in the wall. Sparks flashed. Sherlock kept watch down the corridor, keeping two fingers on Joan’s forearm, tracking her position with his touch. He had kept a hand on her elbow all the way down the corridor, too, she realized.
Another theatrical cackle rolled the length of the corridor, echoing through the sound system. “What the hell is that?” Joan asked. “Does he think he’s the Joker?”
“Fenwick. The geneticist who cloned Moriarty with the infantile hope of making Moriarty his lackey, as if that endeavor wasn’t doomed from the start. He is rather enamored of the mad scientist stereotype.” The sound system cackled again. Sherlock gestured impatiently at the ceiling. “As you can hear.”
The door slid open with a soft noise. “After you,” the mechanical man said, standing back with a courtly bow.
“Thank you,” Sherlock said, poking his head through the newly opened door.
“Not at all, Holmes,” the robot replied. “As always, it is my joy and privilege to assist you.”
Inexplicably, Sherlock shot Joan a guilty look.
Before she had time to consider it, however, Sherlock had ducked through the door. A moment later he was back, waving them both through. As she passed, he put a hand on her forearm, then kept it there as they moved down the stairs together. Joan decided enough was enough and took his hand. He didn’t acknowledge it, but he didn’t shake it off, either.
Another cackle followed them.
“It’s coming from the sound system. Do we know he’s even in the building?” Joan asked.
“I’m not certain,” Sherlock said. “It may be a delaying tactic, an attempt to get us to waste unnecessary time here, pursuing a phantom. There’s no strategic point in going after him; they’ve already smuggled out what they came for.”
“A crate of devil’s foot root,” the mechanical man supplied helpfully. “Used as a bioweapon, it will cause mass hallucinations and widespread terror. It can even prove fatal for those of weak constitution.”
Joan looked between them both. “A bioterror agent? You’re serious? We need to stop him.”
Sherlock looked her, and Joan was surprised to see his eyes were wet. “Sherlock?” she said, coming to a stop.
“Holmes?” the mechanical man asked, mirroring her concern.
Sherlock shook his head at her and tried to smile. “It’s nothing. I just… I’ve missed you.”
She squeezed his hand, feeling like she was missing part of the plot. “You said we’re not safe here,” she reminded him.
“Yes, of course,” he agreed, squeezing back, and then they were running down the stairs again, the robot clomping behind them.
Fenwick’s cackle dogged them at irregular intervals. At two points they saw guards-fortunately they were distracted by the usurpation of their PA system-and twice the small party had to double-back until they finally found a pair of unguarded exterior doors.
Sherlock triumphantly depressed the panic bar and led them through. Outside, in the otherwise empty street… Joan’s brain stopped. A British panda car seemed to be settling down to the pavement in front of them. She frowned at it, then looked up.
The sky was full of flying cars.
“I did say 2198,” Sherlock said. He was still holding her hand, but he bounced on his toes in enthusiasm. “The compudroid was not a tip-off?”
She looked at him, then back at the sky. Cars raced past the windows of the skyscrapers that towered above them. She didn’t recognize any of the buildings. She looked farther down the street, then behind her. “This… isn’t New York.”
“New London. The most recent name for the city once called Londinium, Lundenburh, and London. I wouldn’t have thought we were due for another name change yet, but…” he shrugged, “a lot has happened in the last one-hundred-and-eighty-four years.” He shot her a boyish grin. “Flying cars, Watson.”
The door of the vehicle in front of them opened, and a young woman with a neat, two-toned bob leaned across the empty seat. She wore a silver jumpsuit of her own, although hers seemed to be outfitted with panels of body armor and an assortment of utility pockets. “Holmes! Watson! Get in the car already!” she bellowed.
The mechanical man obediently clanked to the car and got in.
Joan looked at the machine settling its seat belt around itself, and then at Sherlock. His guilty look was back again. “...Watson?” Joan asked.
Sherlock’s dismayed expression told her everything she needed to know. “I said it was a long story. For now, can we just-?” he urged her toward the car.
She gave him one of her best and-then-we-will-talk-mister looks and walked past him to the car. She took the front, leaving him to sit in the back next to the robot he called Watson.
Sherlock leaned forward from the backseat. “Joan Watson, Inspector Beth Lestrade of New Scotland Yard, Gareth’s great-granddaughter.”
The woman did a double-take from Joan to Sherlock. “Wait. The Joan Watson?”
“Pleased to meet you,” Joan acknowledged, looking to Sherlock for a hint. He made a face; more of the long story, then.
“The pleasure is mine, believe me.” She gave Joan a bold once-over, and grinned. “And I bet you are not one thing like that bucket of bolts back there.”
It was the 221B Joan had seen before on their single trip to London together, but the interior styling no longer showed the clean, boring lines that Mycroft had imposed upon it. She paused inside the door, surveying it.
“You’ve been here a while then,” she said.
He glanced around the room, evaluating it through her eyes. “Not in the way you’re thinking, no. The rooms came furnished, it was a museum before.”
“Of what? A faux-Victorian garage sale?”
He looked distinctly uncomfortable. “No. A literary museum to… us.” His gesture included her as well as him. When her eyebrows went up, he fidgeted. “Or rather, depending on how you look at it,” he said, “to us.” He indicated himself and the robot. “It’s all something of a mess.”
“With your leave, Holmes,” the robot said, clanking past them to the stairs, “I’ll clear the second room of my things for the lady.”
Sherlock looked pained.
“This is all part of that promised long story, isn’t it?” she asked with a sigh. “Can I change into something else first?” She viscerally loathed the jumpsuit, and his peacoat was awkwardly large and heavy. She had to shake her hands free of the sleeves every time she wanted to touch something.
“Of course,” he said. “Anything of mine is at your disposal.” He led her to the top of the stairs and indicated the master bedroom as his; she could hear the mechanical man clanking about in the second room off the landing. “And the facilities are through here, you’ll remember. They kept the plumbing from our time, I’m sure it was quite the thrilling experience for school groups.” He hesitated; he seemed reluctant to leave her. “If there’s anything else you need, just shout, I’ll be in earshot.”
Since she had arrived, Sherlock had seemed unable to stop following her every movement with his eyes, and his intensity was more pressure than she had the capacity to handle just now. The last things she remembered clearly was a horror show of drugs and kidnapping and guns, and now suddenly it was all flying cars and people acting like she was a celebrity who had dropped in for the day. She desperately needed some privacy, a moment to catch her breath on her own. “How’s the hot water?”
He gave her a searching look, and for a moment, she wondered if he knew that was her preferred place to cry. “Continuous,” he said, and the gentleness in it almost pushed her over the edge. She nodded and turned toward his room for clothes.
She heard him go into the second bedroom, however, instead of going back down the stairs.
“Holmes, there is no need to say anything,” the robot greeted him, and Joan paused in the doorway of Sherlock’s room. “I accessed the historical files on the way here, and I am very happy that you have recovered your true Watson.”
It didn’t sound happy, Joan noted. It sounded like a rejected suitor standing aside for another. Sherlock shut the door, and she couldn’t hear the rest.
The shower had been as Sherlock promised-controls she understood and endless hot water-and if she didn’t feel precisely better after her cry, she did feel more able to cope.
She had recognized Sherlock’s taste and style when she had gone through his closet, if not the particular articles or fashions. To an item, however, the fabrics were all subtly wrong. Period-piece reproductions, then. There was something about the fact that the styles and fasteners were correct, but the fabrics and inner seams wrong, that made her feel a deep foreboding. She was already feeling the loss of things she would never see again.
When she finally came downstairs-dressed in a t-shirt, shorts, and one of his sweaters, all too large for her-Sherlock sprang to his feet, abandoning what he had been working on. “Tea, Watson?” The eagerness in his eyes had wrenched at her, and she had needed to bite down on the urge to snap at him. But now, curled up on the loveseat around a hot cup of tea, a fluffy blanket around her legs, and with him finally telling the promised long story, normalcy had somewhat reasserted itself. Only the two of them were in the flat; the robot had been sent out shopping while she had been upstairs.
“So, let me get this straight,” Joan said, trying to wrap her head around the absurdity. “Lestrade’s PA, Truepenny-”
“She was his ex-wife by then, but yes.”
“-as some sort of bizarre revenge for god-knows-what, took a bunch of his cases and wrote them up as retro-Victorian popular stories about you-”
“Us,” Sherlock corrected.
She let her disgust show on her face. “Debatable. She wrote me as a white Englishman. Who wasn’t so much your partner as your slightly thick sidekick, if I’m understanding correctly.”
“Mm,” he agreed. “Truepenny really didn’t like you.”
Joan rolled her eyes. “The woman had issues, clearly. I mean, I knew as much at the time, but I obviously never scratched even the tip of that iceberg.” She caught the look in his eyes, and held up a peremptory finger. “Don’t. Don’t say it.”
“Yet another heart burned to ash by the feminine wiles of the great Joan Watson,” he pronounced, undeterred. She gave him an unimpressed look, but the sheer familiarity of it was almost comforting.
“And these stories became popular enough that a hundred and fifty years later, some cracked geneticist decided to clone himself a new Moriarty. Because clearly, that’s what the world needs. So Lestrade’s great-granddaughter, also addled by Truepenny’s books, decided that only the great Sherlock Holmes could take down Moriarty-”
“As I said, Truepenny really didn’t like you.”
“-and so Lestrade re-animated your corpse, and now you’re a zombie.”
“Unnecessarily prejudicial, but yes.”
“And then Lestrade’s service-issue compudroid, nicknamed Watson because Lestrade is a raging fangirl, decided to up and read all these books, and it became-?” She stopped, because really, there were limits.
“-the physical instantiation of the literary character, Dr. John H. Watson, yes, you have it precisely.”
She took a sip of tea, trying to wrap her mind around it. “I am never going to read these books. Clearly, they do something to people’s brains.”
He grimaced. “I would recommend staying away from the holovids, as well.” She glanced at him for clarification, and his expression told her all she wanted to know about that.
She sighed. “And you decided to keep it around and call it Watson, because…?”
“Because that’s his name. And as far as ‘keeping him around’ goes, he’s reasonably competent-far better than many of the holovid versions-and despite reporting to Inspector Lestrade and the Yard, he’s devotedly loyal.”
Joan’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s a sycophant,” she said, and Sherlock flushed.
“He’s loyal,” Sherlock returned with some heat. “And I was,” his hand worked in agitation, “very alone when I first came here. Believe me, if it had shown up with your face, aping your mannerisms, it would have been a different thing entirely.”
She shied from the image of her face on that thing, and likewise Sherlock’s intensity about it: it pointed at things she would rather not look at. “So why…? Who put me in suspended animation? I remember the kidnapping, and then Mycroft came to the exchange… The men he brought with him, they turned on us.”
Sherlock growled in frustration. “I don’t know. After Millieu, I tracked you as far as MI6, and then I hit a wall. I did some work for them, hoping for a way to get inside, or to at least to exchange my cooperation for information, but… zilch. Mycroft tried to tell me that he wasn’t behind it-”
“He wasn’t,” she said. She didn’t remember much from after her rescue from Millieu, but she clearly remembered Mycroft’s rage and panic, and his swearing to her that he would fix it.
Sherlock snarled. “Don’t tell me that after all that, you still have feelings-”
“I don’t.” Mycroft’s lies to them both, topped by two back-to-back kidnappings, had put paid to that. “But whoever they were, they were trying to control him. And probably you, too.” She could see it all as clearly as if she had been awake for it: she was the leash on them both, and the wedge that had kept them divided from each other. “Mycroft was trying to fix it, too. I remember that much. But the two of you never worked together on getting me out, did you? I bet you two never worked together again.” She gave a dry laugh, unable to stop the bitterness from rising. “That was exactly what they wanted, you know. Think what you might have accomplished if you had.”
Sherlock had gone deathly pale, every line in his body rigid. “Watson,” he finally choked out. “I-”
It was 2198, and everyone she knew was dead. Everyone except Sherlock Holmes.
“Tell me about the bioterror agent,” she said.
Two hours later, she had a raging headache from frustration and eyestrain. There was too much that she didn’t know, too much she didn’t understand. “This isn’t working. I’m just slowing you down.”
Sherlock was taut with unhappiness beside her, as he had been all afternoon. He had suggested a break an hour before, when her frustration had first begun to mount, but she had wanted to push through, unnerved by the possibility that if she didn’t have this, she would have nothing.
“It’s no matter,” he said. “Bringing you up to speed is an opportunity for me to review the facts.”
She glared at him. “Don’t coddle me. There’s reviewing the facts, and then there are elementary school lessons on where milk comes from.”
His mouth twitched. “Cows, Watson. Milk still comes from cows. Flying cars, yes, but no food replicators. Not as of yet.”
She pressed her palms against her eyes, trying to relieve the headache. “No time travel, either, I presume.”
She heard him go still; even his breathing stopped. “If it was within my power to return you to your proper place among your family and friends,” he said, and she nodded, because of course he would. Guilt had always been a terrible motivator for them both.
She couldn’t justify putting it off any longer. “What happened to my family?”
“Ah. One moment,” he said, and stepped away. She heard him moving about in another part of the flat, and when he returned, she heard him place something on the desk in front of her. She looked. A glass of water and two pills.
She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry. “Rather old-fashioned, isn’t that? Don’t they have some magic headache-curing ray?”
“They do,” he said, positioning a chair near her side, where he wasn’t in her line of sight, but she could still see him if she wished. That, too, was terribly familiar. “It doesn’t work very well. Paracetamol is still very much in vogue. They haven’t beaten the common cold yet, either.”
She snorted. It was a pipe dream to believe they ever would. “The virus evolves too quickly.”
“Precisely, Watson. People are still people, biology is still biology-”
“-and Shakespeare still speaks to us four hundred years after his time. I know these things, Sherlock.”
“Six hundred years, too, you’ll find. And people are still just as confused about what ‘wherefore’ means.”
She swallowed the pills. “I didn’t ask for a pep talk. I asked about my family.”
“Of course.” He fidgeted in her peripheral vision. “I’m sorry, Watson. I confess, I was negligent about telling your family immediately. I had hoped that we would recover you promptly, and then you could disclose your ordeal to them or keep it private, as you best preferred. When it became clear that I had irrevocably lost control of the situation, I informed your mother.” He paused. “I will not say that she took it badly; it’s dishonest to imply that there’s a way to take that kind of information well. I was persona non grata in your family thereafter, so my information is limited. I sometimes saw your mother: I tried to keep her informed of the results of my investigation, such as they were. She died at seventy-three of cancer. She... asked to see me before she died, and insisted I continue to look for you.” He hesitated. “I had begun using again; she saw that and gave me a tongue-lashing for it. She quoted verbatim at me most of that speech I made at dinner that first night, the one about measuring your legacy in lives rebuilt and, by proxy, lives saved.” He was silent for a while. “I missed her funeral because I was in rehab.”
Joan had her hands over her eyes again, holding back the ache for her mother. “And my father?” Her voice was thick.
He shook his head. “My main interaction with the Watsons was through your mother; I lost contact with them after she died, but your stepfather was still alive at that time.”
She could find out. There would at least be an obituary, even if she had to go to a historical society to find it.
“Your birth father… When I realized you would not be returning anytime soon, I took over some of your work at the shelter.”
“Penance.”
“Amends,” he corrected. “You were not there to do the things you should have been doing, and... I had a part in that. I took over your obligations at Gerald Castoro’s grave, as well.” He paused. “I was right, you know. Joey timed at least some of his visits for when he believed you would be there.”
She turned her head to look at him. “You gave him money,” she said, after a moment.
He avoided her eyes. “I thought you would have, and it wasn’t my place to gainsay that. I would have argued with you about it if you had been there, yes, absolutely, but…you weren’t.” His fingers twitched the thought away. “I also spent a harrowing afternoon looking at pictures of his infant daughter, Geraldine.”
She would have enjoyed that afternoon, if it had been her. She might never have been permitted to meet his daughter-too awkward to explain that this is the woman who killed your grandfather-but she would have enjoyed the photos.
“He did eventually become an engineer,” he said. “Yes, he told me about your scholarship offer. I had the impression he even enjoyed the career.”
She nodded. “You were saying about my birth father.”
He sighed. “Of course. I was never fortunate enough to meet him. When there had been no word of him for some years, I was able to confirm that he had died of exposure in February of 2017. Again, I am sorry. I did manage to identify his ashes, and had them returned to your brother.”
She bit her lip, wondering what Oren’s reaction had been. He remembered the time before their father’s schizophrenia had manifested, and even as an adult, Oren had harbored something of a young child’s betrayal toward a delinquent parent. She supposed it might be possible to discover what Oren had done with those ashes, once she figured out how the future worked.
“Thank you,” she said, and Sherlock nodded. “And Oren?”
“Married Gabrielle and had three children with her, the last information I had.”
She nodded, and he waited quietly.
“Oddly,” she said, after some time had passed, “the persistence of Shakespeare is not as much of a comfort as one might think.”
“No,” he agreed quietly. “It isn’t.”
They sat together until the robot’s heavy tread on the stair below roused her.
“I’m going to go lie down,” she excused herself.
“I can’t interest you in dinner first? You haven’t eaten since you arrived.”
“No,” she said, and continued up the stairs.
She sat on the bed in the second bedroom, and listened to the flat door beneath her open and shut, and the quiet murmur of voices. A few minutes later she heard Sherlock’s step on the landing outside her door. “Watson? I have clothes and such here for when you want them.” She didn’t respond, and he lingered on the landing a few moments before leaving again. She tried to remember if it was the first time he had ever respected a closed door.
When she finally roused herself to investigate, there was a neat stack of clothing sitting beside the door, all in the monochromes she preferred for everyday, along with a pair of high-heeled boots. She didn’t immediately recognize the styles, but what she could see struck her as things she could stand to wear. On the top of the stack lay a pair of reading glasses.
She spent most of the night at the window, watching what she could see of the city. The room was on the third floor-second floor, here in London-which put her below most of the air traffic. However, she could still watch the lights swoop and sail past above her, especially once she opened the window to sit on the sill. She wrapped herself in the duvet-the robot had put fresh sheets on the bed, despite, apparently, never using it-and she watched the traffic thin to a trickle as the night wore on. Just before dawn it started to ramp up again, and by daylight it was full rush hour above her. The traffic didn’t seem to snarl as the congestion thickened; from what she could see, the blanket of cars above her just grew taller and taller, until she could barely see the sky through the mass.
When she finally went downstairs, Sherlock was at large multimedia center in the corner. “Ah, Watson! You’re awake,” he said, glancing up. He turned to the screens. “Begging your pardon,” he said, and Joan heard Lestrade’s squawk of protest as the image of her and the robot went dark.
“Was that about the case?”
He made a dismissive gesture. “There’s a new lead, but nothing they need me for.” He stood to face her, looking at her properly for the first time, and frowned.
Joan made a face. “I just slept for two hundred years. I may not sleep again for another five.”
“I wish you’d let someone check you over. The compudroid is... medically trained isn’t strictly correct, but he’s trustworthy and thoroughly qualified. I’ve even seen him perform open-heart surgery.”
Of course the replacement Watson of the future was a surgeon. “This wasn’t in a clinical setting, I take it.”
He eyed her, aware that he had stepped wrong. For once, she didn’t care what he saw.
“What did it use, its bare hands?”
“No, a thermal regenerator,” he said warily, gesturing at his stomach, where the robot kept its tools.
How handy. She closed her eyes. “Did its patient live?”
“Watson,” Sherlock said, but she ignored him.
“Because mine didn’t. I don’t keep a convenient surgical kit in my stomach, so I had to do it with a box cutter and vodka, and then he died. It took him a day to die, helped along by another bullet,” she couldn’t stop the words from coming, “because he was still bleeding internally, the first bullet probably nicked his liver, I couldn’t stop that, not with what I had, and when I leaned on them to take him to a hospital, when I said it was take it to a hospital or watch him die they put a bullet in him instead, and don’t touch me.”
Sherlock froze mid-stride, his hands out to his sides, signaling that he had no intention to do anything whatsoever with them. He took half a step back. The expression on his face was painful to look at, nothing but naked sympathy and heartache, and so she didn’t look at him.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “Watson. It was not your fault. It wasn’t even a surgical error, it’s just something that happened, something out of your control entirely.”
“No, it was a consulting detective error. He died because I was trying to use my patient to get psychological leverage over my captors. I should have been thinking like a doctor, and instead...” She bit off the rest.
“You were thinking like someone trying to survive a kidnapping.”
She shook her head. “No. You never took the oath; it’s not something you would understand.”
“Watson. You were the best chance he could have had, but that doesn’t make it your fault that it wasn’t enough.” She shook her head in denial. “You had, listen to yourself, you had nothing.” She was silent. “If it had been me who had been there, unable to save someone, what would you be saying to me right now? It wasn’t your fault.”
She turned aside. “I didn’t come down here to talk about this.”
He took a deep breath. “Perhaps you should.”
She shook her head, her lips pressed tight together.
He scrubbed his face, making a noise of frustration. “Breakfast, then?”
She shook her head again. The thought of eating made her nauseous.
“Watson, I have to insist. You didn’t eat at all yesterday.”
“I came down to ask if I have funds of any sort.”
He considered her carefully. “Anything you need, for as long as you need it, I’m at your disposal.” When she said nothing, he added, “You must know that.”
“That’s a no, then. No government program for newly-awake time travellers.”
He sighed. “It may be possible to recover something from Oren’s heirs, I don’t know, but it would take some time.”
When she nodded and turned to go back upstairs, he said, “I hadn’t finished yet.” She turned back. “I get a stipend from New Scotland Yard for my services, and they pay for this place, as well.”
“I’m not an investigator, you may have noticed.”
“You will be,” he said, making an impatient gesture, “if you want to, when you get up to speed again. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours that you’ve been here.” She began to turn away, not in the mood for it. “Watson, that wasn’t the point of that. I get a stipend, yes, but my father’s fortune still exists. His heirs cut me in on a part of it in order to forestall a scandal.” He held up a hand. “I know you won’t accept a piece of that outright, but when you were abducted, you were in my active employ, following a lead that I had set you on. Can we call it hazard pay? Due compensation for undue inconvenience?”
She considered. Knowing him, he would probably try to settle an extravagant sum on her-as if one could say what was fair compensation for being displaced in time by two centuries-but it was better than being dependent on him for everything she needed, every minute of every day, for God only knew how long it would take to get back on her feet again. She nodded. “That’s acceptable.” She turned to go back up the stairs.
“Can I ask what you need it for?” She continued to climb the stairs. “Watson,” he called after her, “if I thought you were going to do something foolish with it-”
She turned. “You would what? Not let me have it? This so-called ‘hazard pay’ that I earned?”
He took a deep breath, steeling himself. “If need be, yes. You’re still in emotional shock, if not also experiencing physical aftereffects.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re not my guardian.”
“And yet I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that you are in a potentially fragile state right now.” She turned and began climbing the stairs again. “Watson,” he pleaded, “just… tell me what you need. Please.”
She turned and looked at him. His entire body was leaning toward her, as if he was barely restraining himself from going to her. “I need a hotel room.”
His face went blank and polite. “For?”
“For staying in. Until I get back on my feet.”
Another two seconds went by, and his expressions abruptly came back on. “I think that’s unwise.”
“Unwise? Moriarty is out there with a bioterror agent, and you’re here trying to make me breakfast.”
“Lestrade and Watson can handle this without me. You, however, need me right now.”
“No. I’m a distraction. This is exactly what you did with Irene, you know.”
“Because at the time, I thought Irene was severely traumatized! I regret that I didn’t recognize what she was sooner, but I have no regrets whatsoever, none, about devoting my time to someone I cared for who was in need of that time and attention!”
“And she allowed you to do that, because as it turned out, she was a criminal mastermind who was deliberately attempting to preoccupy your time!”
His jaw worked. “This is irrelevant. You are not a criminal mastermind. You are Watson.”
“And because I am not a criminal mastermind, it is the stuff of my nightmares to think that untold numbers of people may die because you were too distracted by me to stop it! Look, I can’t be useful on this one, we’ve already established that-”
“We have not established that, you have always seen Moriarty more clearly than I have, and I see no reason-”
“-but I can at least get out of the way of the investigation!”
He considered her, his hand drumming alongside his thigh. “This is exactly what you did after your patient died.”
“What?”
“You took yourself away from everyone you knew. You pushed everyone away and refused to take any help or comfort for yourself.”
“Excuse me? Did Jen tell you this? How many people did you pull your Tony from Long Island gambit on?”
“People talk, Watson! Your friends all thought you were dead! Sometimes I would cross paths with one, and then they would want to reminisce!” He said the word as if it was distasteful. “Emily actually came to the brownstone and spent an entire evening crying at me while she went through a bottle of wine!”
“Oh, God.” Joan recoiled, trying to imagine the scene.
“The dead don’t have secrets, or privacy, you know that. Which is how I know that, yes, this is precisely what you did when Gerald Castoro died.” He came to the foot of the stairs. “And perhaps if I knew you had other friends, other people who cared about you-your mother, Emily, Hope, Jennifer, Ms. Hudson, even Bell,” Joan’s vision blurred at the relentless list of names, “I could be more sanguine about your wishing to withdraw. There would be a whole constellation of us who cared enough to make sure you were well and had what you needed. But there isn’t. There’s just me.”
His face was naked with emotion. She looked away. When that wasn’t enough, she closed her eyes.
“Watson,” he said, pleading.
She shook her head. “That’s… That’s precisely the problem. It was difficult enough before, but now? There’s you, and your evil ex-girlfriend. That’s it. That’s the full extent of everything. My entire world now, all of it, everything, is you. I mean, even this place.” She gestured to the space around them. “Are you going to try to tell me this was called the Holmes and Watson Museum? Because I’ve met the robot, and I’m not buying it.” Sherlock looked ill, but didn’t deny it. “You and your brother… It’s like being an asteroid, sucked into the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. And any atmosphere I had has already been sucked away-everything in my life is literally gone, Sherlock-and the next thing I have to look forward to is being broken up by tidal forces, or just being entirely subsumed. And the effect on you will be, what, a scar on your clouds for a few years? I have to get out, Sherlock.”
He looked stricken. “That’s not what you are, Watson. That’s never been who you were.”
“And yet.” She sat down where she was on the stairs, too exhausted to bother with the effort to stand anymore. “This is who I’ve suddenly become. A leash for you. A distraction for you. Maybe, if I’m lucky, someone who makes you better.” She leaned her head back against the wall. “Fine. How did you come to find me yesterday?”
“There’s a pseudonymous informant I sometimes work with, Porlock. He’s given me good information on Moriarty’s moves in the past. The tip-off came from him.”
“And that’s not suggestive to you? You haven’t considered that he’s feeding you exactly the information that Moriarty wants you to have?”
He swallowed. “I’ve considered it. The possibility doesn’t make it easier to let you go off on your own.”
She looked up at him. “So you think I’m thrilled with my options right now?”
He watched her. “You would be alone, Watson. And if you needed something?”
“They don’t have phones anymore?”
“They do.” His eyes were serious. “Would you use one?”
She put her head on her knees. He came to sit a few steps below her.
“You never ask for anything, Watson. Never. And I realize that when we first came together, you were my paid sobriety companion and I was your client, and it would have been unethical to lean on me. But we never managed to escape that dynamic. You never trusted me to be your equal, because we never had a clean break between that and becoming partners.”
“I trust you.”
“You trusted me to not explode the brownstone with you in it.” Joan made a noise something like a sob. Mere weeks ago, that had been, and yet apparently nearly two centuries. “You weren’t awake for it,” he continued, “but I’ve had that clean break. I’ve been sober and I’ve had relapses and I did rehab again. I’ve had sponsors and sponsees and all of it. You are not a major piece of my sobriety anymore. You haven’t been for a long time. We are very far from companion and client now.”
She turned her head to look at him. “How old are you?”
“Subjectively? Are we counting or discounting the period of dementia?” At her look, he expanded, “Too much boxing when I was young and high; I’m hoping to skip that this time around.” He gave her a wary glance. “I’m in my mid-eighties, give or take. Although that doesn’t describe the experience, my neurology is much younger than that. It’s...” He gestured in irritation at his skull, “...distracting.”
“It’s been a half-century for you since we were partners,” she said. “It’s a wonder you remember me at all.”
The look he gave her was so deeply wounded that she couldn’t help but laugh at him. It was wet laughter, but genuine.
“My question stands, Watson. If you needed something, would you call?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. In my head, you’re still… I haven’t had that clean break yet.”
He nodded, his eyes fixed on the stair treads. “I understand.” He sat silent for a moment, thinking it over. “This is something you need to do? You’re sure?”
She nodded.
“May I at least choose the hotel? This is not… If you are in earnest that my attention should be on the case and not you, then I will need to know that you’re somewhere with competent security.”
She wanted to be out and free and gone, but she could see the sense in it. “That may be wise.”
He shook his head. “You’ve been through what would be several major traumas all on their own, you’re grieving everyone you know, and the culture shock is going to get worse before it gets better. I think this is very far from wise.”
“I need to get out, Sherlock.”
“I heard you. I’m-” He looked up at her. “Which am I, Saturn or Jupiter?”
“Saturn. And don’t make a fat joke about your brother.”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I’ll also need-”
“How did this become about what you need?”
“And you have struck the pate. But nevertheless, if you are going to do this, I will ask that you check in with the concierge whenever you leave the hotel, and likewise let them know when you intend to be back.” At her inhale, he rushed on, “This is not a back-door attempt to surveil you or control your movements. We can have them call Inspector Lestrade instead of me, if you wish. But I need to know that someone will notice if you go missing again.”
She sighed. “I really think someone would make sure you knew, Sherlock. Abductions don’t work properly, otherwise.”
His inhale was ragged. “I am asking, Watson. I’m not going to pretend that my experience was worse than yours, but neither have you lived this end of it. Please, will you do this for me?”
He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands in his agitation. She reached down to touch his wrist, and his hand struck for hers as if released from a spring. After an instant of scrabbling, they settled into clasping each other’s forearms, palms to wrists. He clung tightly. She held back just as hard.
“Watson?” he prompted, not looking at her.
“Yes,” she finally said, “I’ll do that for you. And you? Will you do this for me?”
He squeezed, and she felt the tendons in his forearm shift under her fingers.
“Yes,” he said. “I should… make arrangements.”
But he didn’t get up, and neither did she.
Recipient: amindamazed
Author: sanguinity
Fandoms: Elementary; Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century
Characters/Pairings: Joan Watson & Sherlock Holmes
Rating: Mature
Warnings: off-screen major character deaths, mentions of drug use
Summary: It was 2198, and everyone Joan Watson knew was dead. Everyone except Sherlock Holmes.
Tags: AU, crack, hurt/comfort, angst, unhappy endings
Words: approx 8,000
Author Notes:
Elementary spoilers through 2x22 "Paint it Black," divergent thereafter.
Presumes no prior knowledge of Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, and spoilers are limited largely to 1x01 "The Fall and Rise of Sherlock Holmes." However, this story is a major break from that show’s tone; please heed the warnings and tags.
Major thanks to my betas, grrlpup and beanarie, who held my hand every step of the way. All remaining faults with the story are my own.
Sherlock's voice shook with tension. "Can you hear me? I need you to open your eyes for me." There was firm pressure on the inside of Joan’s wrist: he was monitoring her pulse. "Open your eyes. Open your eyes, please."
Joan opened her eyes. She winced away from the brightness of the light; Sherlock’s silhouette immediately shifted position to shade her from it.
It took a moment to focus on his face-he was very close-and when she did, he looked younger than he ought. His skin was softer, smoother. Visual aura, she thought, and wondered if she had a head injury.
Sherlock was examining her face, concentrating every ounce of attention he had on her. His breathing was ragged. "It's all right," she reassured him. She was still groping for context; his anxiety clearly indicated that the larger context, whatever it was, was very far from alright. But whatever was going on, she didn’t seem to be seriously injured, and neither was he, which meant that at a fundamental level things were all right. She reversed his grip on her wrist and squeezed his hand in hers. "I'm alright." She held his gaze, letting him assure himself of whatever he needed to know.
She still didn't know where she was, or why she had been unconscious, but except for the fact that he appeared too young-and that was a puzzling neurological symptom-she felt far better than his anxiety suggested she should. Her calmness might also be a symptom. She tried to look past him. He was taking up most of her field of vision-
-she had only seen that much hair on him in photos from his youth. She frowned.
"Watson," he breathed. The tension in his frame eased slightly.
There was the grinding of servo motors nearby. "Holmes." The voice was British, male, and had mechanical overtones. "How may I assist?"
Irritation swept over Sherlock's face, and he jerked to look over his shoulder. The movement revealed a large, metallic humanoid figure with an uncannily human face standing behind him, leaning over them both.
It peered through a monocle at her. "My bio-med scanners detect an elevated heart rate, but otherwise, all physiological responses-"
"Yes, thank you," Sherlock said, impatiently gesturing it away. "We need some privacy, if you don't mind."
The figure's mustache and muttonchops drooped in hurt, but he showed no resentment of Sherlock's rudeness. "Yes, of course. I shall be just over here when you need me." The figure clanked as it moved away.
"What was that?" Joan asked, feeling, for the first time since she woke, slightly panicked.
"A compudroid," Sherlock answered, returning his attention to her. "Never mind that just now. How old are you? And what year is it?"
"2014,” she said, and did some arithmetic. “Forty-three."
He let out an explosive breath and shut his eyes, clutching her hand tightly.
"Sherlock, what's happening?"
“Watson, I’m sorry,” he whispered.
His hairline was enormously distracting. It had receded slightly over the time that they had known each other, but she had never seen it as low as this. "Why do you have so much hair?" She tried to lift her free hand to touch it. Something checked her movement.
"Let me get these,” he said, half-panicked, and then it was as if a dam had broken. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Watson," he repeated, as he fumbled one-handed to undo the restraints that held her down. He never let go of her other hand.
"Sherlock," she insisted, "talk to me."
He freed the last buckle, and took a deep breath. "You were abducted in the year 2014,” he said, and her eyebrows went up at the suggestion that it was no longer 2014. “I searched for you, but I never found you, nor any conclusive evidence of what became of you. I eventually came to suspect my brother and MI6, but... I searched for decades, Watson." Sherlock clearly believed what he was saying. However ludicrous the implied dates of his story, the pain in his eyes was real.
She took his other hand to steady him. He gripped it as tightly as the first. “Go on,” she urged, needing more data on his mental state, “when is it now?”
"It is now the year 2198. Yes, I know, Watson, I know. Gareth Lestrade's great-granddaughter had my body reanimated and rejuvenated when a clone of Moriarty started terrorizing New-" He gave an exasperated breath. "No. It's a long story, and it doesn't matter just now. The important part is that I've found you. And you're alive."
Joan searched Sherlock’s eyes; he was in perfect earnest. “You realize you’re not making a lot of sense right now.”
“I realize, yes. But we’re in what is supposed to be a secure government facility, and we don’t have a lot of time. Can you sit up? Can you walk?”
He stepped back to give her space, but a wave of lightheadedness attacked her when she sat up. He crowded close again, and she held up a hand. “Just dizzy. I’ll be fine in a moment.”
There was the noise of servos and clanking, and the mechanical man said from beside them, “Holmes, I have taken the liberty of calling Inspector Lestrade. Madam, I can carry you, if you are still feeling unwell? It would be no trouble at all.” His monocle and muttonchops were faintly ridiculous, but his expression was painfully honest in its helpfulness.
She was getting flashes of memory: black SUVs and government helicopters, gunshots and zipties and being too drug-addled to track what was happening to her. She was finished with being in other people’s control. “I can walk, thanks.” Even if she couldn’t walk, she would still walk somehow. She looked to Sherlock. “Could I get some clothes?” For some reason, she was wearing a skintight silver jumpsuit.
Sherlock shrugged out of his peacoat and placed it around her shoulders. She had a flash of Marchef doing the same to her in a dark warehouse, and she shied from his touch, just as Sherlock’s scent rose from the heavy fabric to surround her, homelike and comforting. He abruptly pulled his hands away, biting his lip. “When we get home, we’ll get you something else,” he said. “I’ll send-” his eyes flicked to the mechanical man standing near them, “him out for some. But for your peace of mind, your costume is not as outré as you imagine it to be.”
“Holmes is correct,” the machine said, “but I would be pleased to procure something that is more to your liking when we are in a safer location.”
Joan’s eyes flicked between Sherlock and the metal man. Sherlock was keeping something back from her, and she didn’t like it. But the list of things that she didn’t like was a mile long and was currently topped by the eerie sea of glassed-in coffins that surrounded them, each with its own panel of gently pulsing colored lights. Leaving was a priority; sorting out whatever was going on with Sherlock could wait.
She slid off the table and onto her feet. Sherlock brought a hand to her elbow to steady her, as he scanned the far reaches of the room. His hand pressed at Joan’s elbow. “This way.”
An evil cackle echoed across the room. Both men, metal and flesh, froze.
“It’s Fenwick!” the robot said.
“I heard, yes,” Sherlock snapped, and then both man and robot closed around her to hustle her toward an exit.
The corridor on the other side of the doors was generic industrial. Sherlock chose a door set into an alcove two-thirds along the hallway, surveyed it, and then looked to the robot. “Would you do the honors?”
“Of course,” it answered, going to one knee before the service panel set beside the door. It opened a compartment in its belly and drew out a series of tools, applying them in turn to the mechanism in the wall. Sparks flashed. Sherlock kept watch down the corridor, keeping two fingers on Joan’s forearm, tracking her position with his touch. He had kept a hand on her elbow all the way down the corridor, too, she realized.
Another theatrical cackle rolled the length of the corridor, echoing through the sound system. “What the hell is that?” Joan asked. “Does he think he’s the Joker?”
“Fenwick. The geneticist who cloned Moriarty with the infantile hope of making Moriarty his lackey, as if that endeavor wasn’t doomed from the start. He is rather enamored of the mad scientist stereotype.” The sound system cackled again. Sherlock gestured impatiently at the ceiling. “As you can hear.”
The door slid open with a soft noise. “After you,” the mechanical man said, standing back with a courtly bow.
“Thank you,” Sherlock said, poking his head through the newly opened door.
“Not at all, Holmes,” the robot replied. “As always, it is my joy and privilege to assist you.”
Inexplicably, Sherlock shot Joan a guilty look.
Before she had time to consider it, however, Sherlock had ducked through the door. A moment later he was back, waving them both through. As she passed, he put a hand on her forearm, then kept it there as they moved down the stairs together. Joan decided enough was enough and took his hand. He didn’t acknowledge it, but he didn’t shake it off, either.
Another cackle followed them.
“It’s coming from the sound system. Do we know he’s even in the building?” Joan asked.
“I’m not certain,” Sherlock said. “It may be a delaying tactic, an attempt to get us to waste unnecessary time here, pursuing a phantom. There’s no strategic point in going after him; they’ve already smuggled out what they came for.”
“A crate of devil’s foot root,” the mechanical man supplied helpfully. “Used as a bioweapon, it will cause mass hallucinations and widespread terror. It can even prove fatal for those of weak constitution.”
Joan looked between them both. “A bioterror agent? You’re serious? We need to stop him.”
Sherlock looked her, and Joan was surprised to see his eyes were wet. “Sherlock?” she said, coming to a stop.
“Holmes?” the mechanical man asked, mirroring her concern.
Sherlock shook his head at her and tried to smile. “It’s nothing. I just… I’ve missed you.”
She squeezed his hand, feeling like she was missing part of the plot. “You said we’re not safe here,” she reminded him.
“Yes, of course,” he agreed, squeezing back, and then they were running down the stairs again, the robot clomping behind them.
Fenwick’s cackle dogged them at irregular intervals. At two points they saw guards-fortunately they were distracted by the usurpation of their PA system-and twice the small party had to double-back until they finally found a pair of unguarded exterior doors.
Sherlock triumphantly depressed the panic bar and led them through. Outside, in the otherwise empty street… Joan’s brain stopped. A British panda car seemed to be settling down to the pavement in front of them. She frowned at it, then looked up.
The sky was full of flying cars.
“I did say 2198,” Sherlock said. He was still holding her hand, but he bounced on his toes in enthusiasm. “The compudroid was not a tip-off?”
She looked at him, then back at the sky. Cars raced past the windows of the skyscrapers that towered above them. She didn’t recognize any of the buildings. She looked farther down the street, then behind her. “This… isn’t New York.”
“New London. The most recent name for the city once called Londinium, Lundenburh, and London. I wouldn’t have thought we were due for another name change yet, but…” he shrugged, “a lot has happened in the last one-hundred-and-eighty-four years.” He shot her a boyish grin. “Flying cars, Watson.”
The door of the vehicle in front of them opened, and a young woman with a neat, two-toned bob leaned across the empty seat. She wore a silver jumpsuit of her own, although hers seemed to be outfitted with panels of body armor and an assortment of utility pockets. “Holmes! Watson! Get in the car already!” she bellowed.
The mechanical man obediently clanked to the car and got in.
Joan looked at the machine settling its seat belt around itself, and then at Sherlock. His guilty look was back again. “...Watson?” Joan asked.
Sherlock’s dismayed expression told her everything she needed to know. “I said it was a long story. For now, can we just-?” he urged her toward the car.
She gave him one of her best and-then-we-will-talk-mister looks and walked past him to the car. She took the front, leaving him to sit in the back next to the robot he called Watson.
Sherlock leaned forward from the backseat. “Joan Watson, Inspector Beth Lestrade of New Scotland Yard, Gareth’s great-granddaughter.”
The woman did a double-take from Joan to Sherlock. “Wait. The Joan Watson?”
“Pleased to meet you,” Joan acknowledged, looking to Sherlock for a hint. He made a face; more of the long story, then.
“The pleasure is mine, believe me.” She gave Joan a bold once-over, and grinned. “And I bet you are not one thing like that bucket of bolts back there.”
It was the 221B Joan had seen before on their single trip to London together, but the interior styling no longer showed the clean, boring lines that Mycroft had imposed upon it. She paused inside the door, surveying it.
“You’ve been here a while then,” she said.
He glanced around the room, evaluating it through her eyes. “Not in the way you’re thinking, no. The rooms came furnished, it was a museum before.”
“Of what? A faux-Victorian garage sale?”
He looked distinctly uncomfortable. “No. A literary museum to… us.” His gesture included her as well as him. When her eyebrows went up, he fidgeted. “Or rather, depending on how you look at it,” he said, “to us.” He indicated himself and the robot. “It’s all something of a mess.”
“With your leave, Holmes,” the robot said, clanking past them to the stairs, “I’ll clear the second room of my things for the lady.”
Sherlock looked pained.
“This is all part of that promised long story, isn’t it?” she asked with a sigh. “Can I change into something else first?” She viscerally loathed the jumpsuit, and his peacoat was awkwardly large and heavy. She had to shake her hands free of the sleeves every time she wanted to touch something.
“Of course,” he said. “Anything of mine is at your disposal.” He led her to the top of the stairs and indicated the master bedroom as his; she could hear the mechanical man clanking about in the second room off the landing. “And the facilities are through here, you’ll remember. They kept the plumbing from our time, I’m sure it was quite the thrilling experience for school groups.” He hesitated; he seemed reluctant to leave her. “If there’s anything else you need, just shout, I’ll be in earshot.”
Since she had arrived, Sherlock had seemed unable to stop following her every movement with his eyes, and his intensity was more pressure than she had the capacity to handle just now. The last things she remembered clearly was a horror show of drugs and kidnapping and guns, and now suddenly it was all flying cars and people acting like she was a celebrity who had dropped in for the day. She desperately needed some privacy, a moment to catch her breath on her own. “How’s the hot water?”
He gave her a searching look, and for a moment, she wondered if he knew that was her preferred place to cry. “Continuous,” he said, and the gentleness in it almost pushed her over the edge. She nodded and turned toward his room for clothes.
She heard him go into the second bedroom, however, instead of going back down the stairs.
“Holmes, there is no need to say anything,” the robot greeted him, and Joan paused in the doorway of Sherlock’s room. “I accessed the historical files on the way here, and I am very happy that you have recovered your true Watson.”
It didn’t sound happy, Joan noted. It sounded like a rejected suitor standing aside for another. Sherlock shut the door, and she couldn’t hear the rest.
The shower had been as Sherlock promised-controls she understood and endless hot water-and if she didn’t feel precisely better after her cry, she did feel more able to cope.
She had recognized Sherlock’s taste and style when she had gone through his closet, if not the particular articles or fashions. To an item, however, the fabrics were all subtly wrong. Period-piece reproductions, then. There was something about the fact that the styles and fasteners were correct, but the fabrics and inner seams wrong, that made her feel a deep foreboding. She was already feeling the loss of things she would never see again.
When she finally came downstairs-dressed in a t-shirt, shorts, and one of his sweaters, all too large for her-Sherlock sprang to his feet, abandoning what he had been working on. “Tea, Watson?” The eagerness in his eyes had wrenched at her, and she had needed to bite down on the urge to snap at him. But now, curled up on the loveseat around a hot cup of tea, a fluffy blanket around her legs, and with him finally telling the promised long story, normalcy had somewhat reasserted itself. Only the two of them were in the flat; the robot had been sent out shopping while she had been upstairs.
“So, let me get this straight,” Joan said, trying to wrap her head around the absurdity. “Lestrade’s PA, Truepenny-”
“She was his ex-wife by then, but yes.”
“-as some sort of bizarre revenge for god-knows-what, took a bunch of his cases and wrote them up as retro-Victorian popular stories about you-”
“Us,” Sherlock corrected.
She let her disgust show on her face. “Debatable. She wrote me as a white Englishman. Who wasn’t so much your partner as your slightly thick sidekick, if I’m understanding correctly.”
“Mm,” he agreed. “Truepenny really didn’t like you.”
Joan rolled her eyes. “The woman had issues, clearly. I mean, I knew as much at the time, but I obviously never scratched even the tip of that iceberg.” She caught the look in his eyes, and held up a peremptory finger. “Don’t. Don’t say it.”
“Yet another heart burned to ash by the feminine wiles of the great Joan Watson,” he pronounced, undeterred. She gave him an unimpressed look, but the sheer familiarity of it was almost comforting.
“And these stories became popular enough that a hundred and fifty years later, some cracked geneticist decided to clone himself a new Moriarty. Because clearly, that’s what the world needs. So Lestrade’s great-granddaughter, also addled by Truepenny’s books, decided that only the great Sherlock Holmes could take down Moriarty-”
“As I said, Truepenny really didn’t like you.”
“-and so Lestrade re-animated your corpse, and now you’re a zombie.”
“Unnecessarily prejudicial, but yes.”
“And then Lestrade’s service-issue compudroid, nicknamed Watson because Lestrade is a raging fangirl, decided to up and read all these books, and it became-?” She stopped, because really, there were limits.
“-the physical instantiation of the literary character, Dr. John H. Watson, yes, you have it precisely.”
She took a sip of tea, trying to wrap her mind around it. “I am never going to read these books. Clearly, they do something to people’s brains.”
He grimaced. “I would recommend staying away from the holovids, as well.” She glanced at him for clarification, and his expression told her all she wanted to know about that.
She sighed. “And you decided to keep it around and call it Watson, because…?”
“Because that’s his name. And as far as ‘keeping him around’ goes, he’s reasonably competent-far better than many of the holovid versions-and despite reporting to Inspector Lestrade and the Yard, he’s devotedly loyal.”
Joan’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s a sycophant,” she said, and Sherlock flushed.
“He’s loyal,” Sherlock returned with some heat. “And I was,” his hand worked in agitation, “very alone when I first came here. Believe me, if it had shown up with your face, aping your mannerisms, it would have been a different thing entirely.”
She shied from the image of her face on that thing, and likewise Sherlock’s intensity about it: it pointed at things she would rather not look at. “So why…? Who put me in suspended animation? I remember the kidnapping, and then Mycroft came to the exchange… The men he brought with him, they turned on us.”
Sherlock growled in frustration. “I don’t know. After Millieu, I tracked you as far as MI6, and then I hit a wall. I did some work for them, hoping for a way to get inside, or to at least to exchange my cooperation for information, but… zilch. Mycroft tried to tell me that he wasn’t behind it-”
“He wasn’t,” she said. She didn’t remember much from after her rescue from Millieu, but she clearly remembered Mycroft’s rage and panic, and his swearing to her that he would fix it.
Sherlock snarled. “Don’t tell me that after all that, you still have feelings-”
“I don’t.” Mycroft’s lies to them both, topped by two back-to-back kidnappings, had put paid to that. “But whoever they were, they were trying to control him. And probably you, too.” She could see it all as clearly as if she had been awake for it: she was the leash on them both, and the wedge that had kept them divided from each other. “Mycroft was trying to fix it, too. I remember that much. But the two of you never worked together on getting me out, did you? I bet you two never worked together again.” She gave a dry laugh, unable to stop the bitterness from rising. “That was exactly what they wanted, you know. Think what you might have accomplished if you had.”
Sherlock had gone deathly pale, every line in his body rigid. “Watson,” he finally choked out. “I-”
It was 2198, and everyone she knew was dead. Everyone except Sherlock Holmes.
“Tell me about the bioterror agent,” she said.
Two hours later, she had a raging headache from frustration and eyestrain. There was too much that she didn’t know, too much she didn’t understand. “This isn’t working. I’m just slowing you down.”
Sherlock was taut with unhappiness beside her, as he had been all afternoon. He had suggested a break an hour before, when her frustration had first begun to mount, but she had wanted to push through, unnerved by the possibility that if she didn’t have this, she would have nothing.
“It’s no matter,” he said. “Bringing you up to speed is an opportunity for me to review the facts.”
She glared at him. “Don’t coddle me. There’s reviewing the facts, and then there are elementary school lessons on where milk comes from.”
His mouth twitched. “Cows, Watson. Milk still comes from cows. Flying cars, yes, but no food replicators. Not as of yet.”
She pressed her palms against her eyes, trying to relieve the headache. “No time travel, either, I presume.”
She heard him go still; even his breathing stopped. “If it was within my power to return you to your proper place among your family and friends,” he said, and she nodded, because of course he would. Guilt had always been a terrible motivator for them both.
She couldn’t justify putting it off any longer. “What happened to my family?”
“Ah. One moment,” he said, and stepped away. She heard him moving about in another part of the flat, and when he returned, she heard him place something on the desk in front of her. She looked. A glass of water and two pills.
She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry. “Rather old-fashioned, isn’t that? Don’t they have some magic headache-curing ray?”
“They do,” he said, positioning a chair near her side, where he wasn’t in her line of sight, but she could still see him if she wished. That, too, was terribly familiar. “It doesn’t work very well. Paracetamol is still very much in vogue. They haven’t beaten the common cold yet, either.”
She snorted. It was a pipe dream to believe they ever would. “The virus evolves too quickly.”
“Precisely, Watson. People are still people, biology is still biology-”
“-and Shakespeare still speaks to us four hundred years after his time. I know these things, Sherlock.”
“Six hundred years, too, you’ll find. And people are still just as confused about what ‘wherefore’ means.”
She swallowed the pills. “I didn’t ask for a pep talk. I asked about my family.”
“Of course.” He fidgeted in her peripheral vision. “I’m sorry, Watson. I confess, I was negligent about telling your family immediately. I had hoped that we would recover you promptly, and then you could disclose your ordeal to them or keep it private, as you best preferred. When it became clear that I had irrevocably lost control of the situation, I informed your mother.” He paused. “I will not say that she took it badly; it’s dishonest to imply that there’s a way to take that kind of information well. I was persona non grata in your family thereafter, so my information is limited. I sometimes saw your mother: I tried to keep her informed of the results of my investigation, such as they were. She died at seventy-three of cancer. She... asked to see me before she died, and insisted I continue to look for you.” He hesitated. “I had begun using again; she saw that and gave me a tongue-lashing for it. She quoted verbatim at me most of that speech I made at dinner that first night, the one about measuring your legacy in lives rebuilt and, by proxy, lives saved.” He was silent for a while. “I missed her funeral because I was in rehab.”
Joan had her hands over her eyes again, holding back the ache for her mother. “And my father?” Her voice was thick.
He shook his head. “My main interaction with the Watsons was through your mother; I lost contact with them after she died, but your stepfather was still alive at that time.”
She could find out. There would at least be an obituary, even if she had to go to a historical society to find it.
“Your birth father… When I realized you would not be returning anytime soon, I took over some of your work at the shelter.”
“Penance.”
“Amends,” he corrected. “You were not there to do the things you should have been doing, and... I had a part in that. I took over your obligations at Gerald Castoro’s grave, as well.” He paused. “I was right, you know. Joey timed at least some of his visits for when he believed you would be there.”
She turned her head to look at him. “You gave him money,” she said, after a moment.
He avoided her eyes. “I thought you would have, and it wasn’t my place to gainsay that. I would have argued with you about it if you had been there, yes, absolutely, but…you weren’t.” His fingers twitched the thought away. “I also spent a harrowing afternoon looking at pictures of his infant daughter, Geraldine.”
She would have enjoyed that afternoon, if it had been her. She might never have been permitted to meet his daughter-too awkward to explain that this is the woman who killed your grandfather-but she would have enjoyed the photos.
“He did eventually become an engineer,” he said. “Yes, he told me about your scholarship offer. I had the impression he even enjoyed the career.”
She nodded. “You were saying about my birth father.”
He sighed. “Of course. I was never fortunate enough to meet him. When there had been no word of him for some years, I was able to confirm that he had died of exposure in February of 2017. Again, I am sorry. I did manage to identify his ashes, and had them returned to your brother.”
She bit her lip, wondering what Oren’s reaction had been. He remembered the time before their father’s schizophrenia had manifested, and even as an adult, Oren had harbored something of a young child’s betrayal toward a delinquent parent. She supposed it might be possible to discover what Oren had done with those ashes, once she figured out how the future worked.
“Thank you,” she said, and Sherlock nodded. “And Oren?”
“Married Gabrielle and had three children with her, the last information I had.”
She nodded, and he waited quietly.
“Oddly,” she said, after some time had passed, “the persistence of Shakespeare is not as much of a comfort as one might think.”
“No,” he agreed quietly. “It isn’t.”
They sat together until the robot’s heavy tread on the stair below roused her.
“I’m going to go lie down,” she excused herself.
“I can’t interest you in dinner first? You haven’t eaten since you arrived.”
“No,” she said, and continued up the stairs.
She sat on the bed in the second bedroom, and listened to the flat door beneath her open and shut, and the quiet murmur of voices. A few minutes later she heard Sherlock’s step on the landing outside her door. “Watson? I have clothes and such here for when you want them.” She didn’t respond, and he lingered on the landing a few moments before leaving again. She tried to remember if it was the first time he had ever respected a closed door.
When she finally roused herself to investigate, there was a neat stack of clothing sitting beside the door, all in the monochromes she preferred for everyday, along with a pair of high-heeled boots. She didn’t immediately recognize the styles, but what she could see struck her as things she could stand to wear. On the top of the stack lay a pair of reading glasses.
She spent most of the night at the window, watching what she could see of the city. The room was on the third floor-second floor, here in London-which put her below most of the air traffic. However, she could still watch the lights swoop and sail past above her, especially once she opened the window to sit on the sill. She wrapped herself in the duvet-the robot had put fresh sheets on the bed, despite, apparently, never using it-and she watched the traffic thin to a trickle as the night wore on. Just before dawn it started to ramp up again, and by daylight it was full rush hour above her. The traffic didn’t seem to snarl as the congestion thickened; from what she could see, the blanket of cars above her just grew taller and taller, until she could barely see the sky through the mass.
When she finally went downstairs, Sherlock was at large multimedia center in the corner. “Ah, Watson! You’re awake,” he said, glancing up. He turned to the screens. “Begging your pardon,” he said, and Joan heard Lestrade’s squawk of protest as the image of her and the robot went dark.
“Was that about the case?”
He made a dismissive gesture. “There’s a new lead, but nothing they need me for.” He stood to face her, looking at her properly for the first time, and frowned.
Joan made a face. “I just slept for two hundred years. I may not sleep again for another five.”
“I wish you’d let someone check you over. The compudroid is... medically trained isn’t strictly correct, but he’s trustworthy and thoroughly qualified. I’ve even seen him perform open-heart surgery.”
Of course the replacement Watson of the future was a surgeon. “This wasn’t in a clinical setting, I take it.”
He eyed her, aware that he had stepped wrong. For once, she didn’t care what he saw.
“What did it use, its bare hands?”
“No, a thermal regenerator,” he said warily, gesturing at his stomach, where the robot kept its tools.
How handy. She closed her eyes. “Did its patient live?”
“Watson,” Sherlock said, but she ignored him.
“Because mine didn’t. I don’t keep a convenient surgical kit in my stomach, so I had to do it with a box cutter and vodka, and then he died. It took him a day to die, helped along by another bullet,” she couldn’t stop the words from coming, “because he was still bleeding internally, the first bullet probably nicked his liver, I couldn’t stop that, not with what I had, and when I leaned on them to take him to a hospital, when I said it was take it to a hospital or watch him die they put a bullet in him instead, and don’t touch me.”
Sherlock froze mid-stride, his hands out to his sides, signaling that he had no intention to do anything whatsoever with them. He took half a step back. The expression on his face was painful to look at, nothing but naked sympathy and heartache, and so she didn’t look at him.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “Watson. It was not your fault. It wasn’t even a surgical error, it’s just something that happened, something out of your control entirely.”
“No, it was a consulting detective error. He died because I was trying to use my patient to get psychological leverage over my captors. I should have been thinking like a doctor, and instead...” She bit off the rest.
“You were thinking like someone trying to survive a kidnapping.”
She shook her head. “No. You never took the oath; it’s not something you would understand.”
“Watson. You were the best chance he could have had, but that doesn’t make it your fault that it wasn’t enough.” She shook her head in denial. “You had, listen to yourself, you had nothing.” She was silent. “If it had been me who had been there, unable to save someone, what would you be saying to me right now? It wasn’t your fault.”
She turned aside. “I didn’t come down here to talk about this.”
He took a deep breath. “Perhaps you should.”
She shook her head, her lips pressed tight together.
He scrubbed his face, making a noise of frustration. “Breakfast, then?”
She shook her head again. The thought of eating made her nauseous.
“Watson, I have to insist. You didn’t eat at all yesterday.”
“I came down to ask if I have funds of any sort.”
He considered her carefully. “Anything you need, for as long as you need it, I’m at your disposal.” When she said nothing, he added, “You must know that.”
“That’s a no, then. No government program for newly-awake time travellers.”
He sighed. “It may be possible to recover something from Oren’s heirs, I don’t know, but it would take some time.”
When she nodded and turned to go back upstairs, he said, “I hadn’t finished yet.” She turned back. “I get a stipend from New Scotland Yard for my services, and they pay for this place, as well.”
“I’m not an investigator, you may have noticed.”
“You will be,” he said, making an impatient gesture, “if you want to, when you get up to speed again. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours that you’ve been here.” She began to turn away, not in the mood for it. “Watson, that wasn’t the point of that. I get a stipend, yes, but my father’s fortune still exists. His heirs cut me in on a part of it in order to forestall a scandal.” He held up a hand. “I know you won’t accept a piece of that outright, but when you were abducted, you were in my active employ, following a lead that I had set you on. Can we call it hazard pay? Due compensation for undue inconvenience?”
She considered. Knowing him, he would probably try to settle an extravagant sum on her-as if one could say what was fair compensation for being displaced in time by two centuries-but it was better than being dependent on him for everything she needed, every minute of every day, for God only knew how long it would take to get back on her feet again. She nodded. “That’s acceptable.” She turned to go back up the stairs.
“Can I ask what you need it for?” She continued to climb the stairs. “Watson,” he called after her, “if I thought you were going to do something foolish with it-”
She turned. “You would what? Not let me have it? This so-called ‘hazard pay’ that I earned?”
He took a deep breath, steeling himself. “If need be, yes. You’re still in emotional shock, if not also experiencing physical aftereffects.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re not my guardian.”
“And yet I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that you are in a potentially fragile state right now.” She turned and began climbing the stairs again. “Watson,” he pleaded, “just… tell me what you need. Please.”
She turned and looked at him. His entire body was leaning toward her, as if he was barely restraining himself from going to her. “I need a hotel room.”
His face went blank and polite. “For?”
“For staying in. Until I get back on my feet.”
Another two seconds went by, and his expressions abruptly came back on. “I think that’s unwise.”
“Unwise? Moriarty is out there with a bioterror agent, and you’re here trying to make me breakfast.”
“Lestrade and Watson can handle this without me. You, however, need me right now.”
“No. I’m a distraction. This is exactly what you did with Irene, you know.”
“Because at the time, I thought Irene was severely traumatized! I regret that I didn’t recognize what she was sooner, but I have no regrets whatsoever, none, about devoting my time to someone I cared for who was in need of that time and attention!”
“And she allowed you to do that, because as it turned out, she was a criminal mastermind who was deliberately attempting to preoccupy your time!”
His jaw worked. “This is irrelevant. You are not a criminal mastermind. You are Watson.”
“And because I am not a criminal mastermind, it is the stuff of my nightmares to think that untold numbers of people may die because you were too distracted by me to stop it! Look, I can’t be useful on this one, we’ve already established that-”
“We have not established that, you have always seen Moriarty more clearly than I have, and I see no reason-”
“-but I can at least get out of the way of the investigation!”
He considered her, his hand drumming alongside his thigh. “This is exactly what you did after your patient died.”
“What?”
“You took yourself away from everyone you knew. You pushed everyone away and refused to take any help or comfort for yourself.”
“Excuse me? Did Jen tell you this? How many people did you pull your Tony from Long Island gambit on?”
“People talk, Watson! Your friends all thought you were dead! Sometimes I would cross paths with one, and then they would want to reminisce!” He said the word as if it was distasteful. “Emily actually came to the brownstone and spent an entire evening crying at me while she went through a bottle of wine!”
“Oh, God.” Joan recoiled, trying to imagine the scene.
“The dead don’t have secrets, or privacy, you know that. Which is how I know that, yes, this is precisely what you did when Gerald Castoro died.” He came to the foot of the stairs. “And perhaps if I knew you had other friends, other people who cared about you-your mother, Emily, Hope, Jennifer, Ms. Hudson, even Bell,” Joan’s vision blurred at the relentless list of names, “I could be more sanguine about your wishing to withdraw. There would be a whole constellation of us who cared enough to make sure you were well and had what you needed. But there isn’t. There’s just me.”
His face was naked with emotion. She looked away. When that wasn’t enough, she closed her eyes.
“Watson,” he said, pleading.
She shook her head. “That’s… That’s precisely the problem. It was difficult enough before, but now? There’s you, and your evil ex-girlfriend. That’s it. That’s the full extent of everything. My entire world now, all of it, everything, is you. I mean, even this place.” She gestured to the space around them. “Are you going to try to tell me this was called the Holmes and Watson Museum? Because I’ve met the robot, and I’m not buying it.” Sherlock looked ill, but didn’t deny it. “You and your brother… It’s like being an asteroid, sucked into the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. And any atmosphere I had has already been sucked away-everything in my life is literally gone, Sherlock-and the next thing I have to look forward to is being broken up by tidal forces, or just being entirely subsumed. And the effect on you will be, what, a scar on your clouds for a few years? I have to get out, Sherlock.”
He looked stricken. “That’s not what you are, Watson. That’s never been who you were.”
“And yet.” She sat down where she was on the stairs, too exhausted to bother with the effort to stand anymore. “This is who I’ve suddenly become. A leash for you. A distraction for you. Maybe, if I’m lucky, someone who makes you better.” She leaned her head back against the wall. “Fine. How did you come to find me yesterday?”
“There’s a pseudonymous informant I sometimes work with, Porlock. He’s given me good information on Moriarty’s moves in the past. The tip-off came from him.”
“And that’s not suggestive to you? You haven’t considered that he’s feeding you exactly the information that Moriarty wants you to have?”
He swallowed. “I’ve considered it. The possibility doesn’t make it easier to let you go off on your own.”
She looked up at him. “So you think I’m thrilled with my options right now?”
He watched her. “You would be alone, Watson. And if you needed something?”
“They don’t have phones anymore?”
“They do.” His eyes were serious. “Would you use one?”
She put her head on her knees. He came to sit a few steps below her.
“You never ask for anything, Watson. Never. And I realize that when we first came together, you were my paid sobriety companion and I was your client, and it would have been unethical to lean on me. But we never managed to escape that dynamic. You never trusted me to be your equal, because we never had a clean break between that and becoming partners.”
“I trust you.”
“You trusted me to not explode the brownstone with you in it.” Joan made a noise something like a sob. Mere weeks ago, that had been, and yet apparently nearly two centuries. “You weren’t awake for it,” he continued, “but I’ve had that clean break. I’ve been sober and I’ve had relapses and I did rehab again. I’ve had sponsors and sponsees and all of it. You are not a major piece of my sobriety anymore. You haven’t been for a long time. We are very far from companion and client now.”
She turned her head to look at him. “How old are you?”
“Subjectively? Are we counting or discounting the period of dementia?” At her look, he expanded, “Too much boxing when I was young and high; I’m hoping to skip that this time around.” He gave her a wary glance. “I’m in my mid-eighties, give or take. Although that doesn’t describe the experience, my neurology is much younger than that. It’s...” He gestured in irritation at his skull, “...distracting.”
“It’s been a half-century for you since we were partners,” she said. “It’s a wonder you remember me at all.”
The look he gave her was so deeply wounded that she couldn’t help but laugh at him. It was wet laughter, but genuine.
“My question stands, Watson. If you needed something, would you call?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. In my head, you’re still… I haven’t had that clean break yet.”
He nodded, his eyes fixed on the stair treads. “I understand.” He sat silent for a moment, thinking it over. “This is something you need to do? You’re sure?”
She nodded.
“May I at least choose the hotel? This is not… If you are in earnest that my attention should be on the case and not you, then I will need to know that you’re somewhere with competent security.”
She wanted to be out and free and gone, but she could see the sense in it. “That may be wise.”
He shook his head. “You’ve been through what would be several major traumas all on their own, you’re grieving everyone you know, and the culture shock is going to get worse before it gets better. I think this is very far from wise.”
“I need to get out, Sherlock.”
“I heard you. I’m-” He looked up at her. “Which am I, Saturn or Jupiter?”
“Saturn. And don’t make a fat joke about your brother.”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I’ll also need-”
“How did this become about what you need?”
“And you have struck the pate. But nevertheless, if you are going to do this, I will ask that you check in with the concierge whenever you leave the hotel, and likewise let them know when you intend to be back.” At her inhale, he rushed on, “This is not a back-door attempt to surveil you or control your movements. We can have them call Inspector Lestrade instead of me, if you wish. But I need to know that someone will notice if you go missing again.”
She sighed. “I really think someone would make sure you knew, Sherlock. Abductions don’t work properly, otherwise.”
His inhale was ragged. “I am asking, Watson. I’m not going to pretend that my experience was worse than yours, but neither have you lived this end of it. Please, will you do this for me?”
He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands in his agitation. She reached down to touch his wrist, and his hand struck for hers as if released from a spring. After an instant of scrabbling, they settled into clasping each other’s forearms, palms to wrists. He clung tightly. She held back just as hard.
“Watson?” he prompted, not looking at her.
“Yes,” she finally said, “I’ll do that for you. And you? Will you do this for me?”
He squeezed, and she felt the tendons in his forearm shift under her fingers.
“Yes,” he said. “I should… make arrangements.”
But he didn’t get up, and neither did she.