Sometimes the days blended together in an endless, grey haze.
Life... went on, after death, as Watson had always known it would inevitably do. There were days he felt but half of himself, but the world wouldn't understand that, so he pulled himself together and found what purpose he could. He wrote, he worked his practice, he spent some time with the Yard, he visited the Lestrades -- in short, he carved himself out some semblance of a new life, with new reasons, and he lived that.
Yet that never stopped him musing over crimes in the papers, wondering what Holmes would have made of them, it never stopped him wanting to hear of work that Lestrade might be involved in that Watson's humble role as a police surgeon did not enter into, it never stopped him missing the feel of Holmes's body in bed beside him. At some point in the last three years he had moved rather more permanently into Holmes's old bedroom, citing that it would be mroe convenient to avoid the stairs to his own, but truly it had just made it easier for him to sleep,
( ... )
He ought to reveal himself; he ought to drop this pretense and tell Watson now, but the pretense is the only thing that's keeping him upright. It is a difficult thing, to raise oneself from the dead, and what if -- what if he would be unwelcome? Watson has not taken up another lover, Holmes can see that; he sleeps in Holmes's room, he hasn't abandoned their flat. But what if, in the intervening years, Watson had decided to release himself from the terms of their always?
What if, upon discovering the game, he decides Holmes doesn't deserve resurrection?
"It's just that I've seen you a time or two, sir; I have a bookshop at the corner, and when I realized I'd bumped into my neighbor, I thought I ought to come and apologize for my gruff manner. Occupational hazard, sir, to be so involved in my books, and I really wasn't watching where I was going. I only wanted to apologize, sir, and to thank you."
"It's hardly worth mentioning," Watson said, rather perplexed. "You were already forgiven." He recalled the bookshop at the corner, vaguely, but could not recall this man at all before their accidental meeting earlier that day. He liked to think he was at least a little more observant than that. An owner who lurked in the back of the shop, unseen? Perhaps.
Still, it was deucedly odd. There were, too, old instincts still in him, from more dangerous days, that told him to be on his toes.
"I trust none of your books were damaged," he said, and truthfully this was something that had concerned him a little. "You needn't have come all this way merely to thank me for picking up your books."
Rather casually, he removed his hat and coat, deposited his stick in its place by the door, and turned back to this stranger, attempting to look carefully neutral.
He clings to the performance; he reminds himself he is still on stage, that he can't reveal himself, but he can feel his hold on the situation beginning to waver. It's time to drop the pretense, and he wills his hands to keep from shaking.
"But it wasn't far! And I thought you might enjoy -- you look the sort that reads, sir. I have here a nice assortment -- British Birds, and Catullus, and The Holy War. Something among the lot is bound to strike your interest, and there's a vacancy on your shelf, just there."
He points at a shelf that really isn't lacking any books at all, except it is lacking everything that was his. He's beginning to sweat, he realizes, and the adrenaline floods his system. If only this could stay a performance; if only he could maintain the act, then he might get through this, but in a very few moments he must step off the stage; he isn't sure he's quite ready.
This was to be a sales pitch, was it? That was more annoying than anything else. Watson glanced automatically at the shelf indicated, and sighed inwardly. The shelf was fine, it needed nothing, this was the maddest excuse to try to sell something he had ever heard of. His guilt over a pedestrian collision in the street did not extend to purchasing obscure and potentially expensive books.
"I'm afraid that--" Watson turned back, as polite a dismissal as he could manage on his tongue, but stopped short, discovering that the bookseller had entirely vanished. He was, instead, replaced with a wholly remarkable and wholly impossible sight: Sherlock Holmes, in the bookseller's clothes.
His mouth fell open, even as the blood drained visibly from his face. Watson did not believe in ghosts. Potentially this was just him finally losing his mind. While he gave a weak sort of groan instead of any verbal reply, his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed in a dead faint.
Holmes almost considers not dropping his disguise, but Watson turns around and his body sets into motion, following the script even as his mind is struggling to keep up. He smiles, tentative and uncertain, when Watson turns around, and he starts to step toward him, but then Watson faints, and Holmes isn't quite sure what to do. There's an embarrassing moment in which he only stares confusedly at Watson on the floor, but once he has a handle on the moment, he hurries to his side.
He manages to get Watson over to the sofa, and he hurriedly pours him a brandy. (In the same spot, in the same sideboard; his hands start to tremble, despite himself.)
"Watson?" he asks, returning to his side. "John?" He administers the brandy, frowning deeply.
Good God, his voice. He hadn't heard that voice in far too long but he knew it like he knew his own soul.
Watson coughed and spluttered on the brandy a little; consciousness returned quickly to him. Finding himself moved to the sofa, and Holmes -- mirculously, impossibly Holmes -- peering anxiously over him. This was real. Holmes was alive, against all odds or sense, and here with him.
"Holmes," Watson said, half perplexed, half disbelieving. As he pulled himself up into a half-seated position, two thoughts occurred to him: first, Sherlock Holmes was not and had never been dead; second, Sherlock Holmes had let him believe in his death anyway. The injustice of that stung. It had all been some damned game, some planned deception, for all the talk of always there was no truth behind it at all.
Suddenly furious with the release of three years worth of grief and pain, Watson drew back his fist and flung a punch at Holmes's face; the brandy went flying, but he hardly cared.
It's a bad day for Holmes's reflexes to be sluggish, but waking up from a long, deep depression has left him weak, rather than refreshed. He really needs to improve on that, and the best lesson he's had of that so far all day is that he gets hit when he could probably have dodged it, had he been paying attention. He falls back onto the floor, and his face throbs as he reaches up to cradle his cheekbone, and he finds himself falling into an insecure panic.
"Watson," he says again, still on the floor, and he takes his hand away from his face once he ascertains no real permanent damage has been done. He struggles for composure; if Watson truly no longer wants him around, then Holmes at least needs to get him through the day, and he'll need to keep himself together.
"Do I need the brandy," Watson scoffed. He got to his feet, his fists still clenched tightly as he took a step towards where Holmes was on the floor. Distantly, he recognised this scene of Holmes on the floor clutching his face as wrong, terrible, particularly if he was responsible, but he was in a red haze of fury.
"How dare you," he hissed. Watson advanced on him, his face a mask of rage and betrayal and hurt. "How dare you! Three years, Holmes. Three years! After all your talk of 'always' you throw this sort of deception in my face?"
He exhaled sharply through his nose, his face no longer white with horror to be sure.
Always. He'd meant it, of course. He still does. In the context of always, three years is but a hiccup, but they didn't feel like a hiccup to him, and obviously not to Watson either. He sighs and gets to his feet, and he arranges his clothes more neatly, and he shrugs out of the bookseller's jacket. The struggle to keep from breaking down entirely is becoming more difficult, but he doesn't want to come apart at Watson's feet. The point of this was to put himself back together.
He'd been prepared for this, and he's already been struggling with guilt, because he could have defeated Moran sooner. He knows this, is sure of it, but his volatile nature finally bested his mind, and he sunk into a numbing depression that left him exposed and vulnerable. He should've fought harder.
"It wasn't my idea," he says, avoiding Watson's eyes as he adjusts his cuffs. "I hope you have another right hook left, for you'll want it by the end of the evening."
"I can certainly think of a target for another good right hook," Watson countered. "It wasn't your idea? What utter nonsense. You were dead. You let me believe you were dead."
Advancing, he grabbed Holmes by the shirt, suppressing the urge to simply shake him violently. "How dare you use me like this," he hissed, sounding far more broken than he had as yet, although no less angry. "Am I nothing more than a prop in your mad schemes?"
His eyes were brimming with angry, frustrated tears, which irritated him even further; the last thing he wanted right now was to appear in any way vulnerable. "Give me one good reason," Watson said, "why I shouldn't throw you out of my home right this instant."
When Watson grabs him, he can't help but look into his eyes, and he doesn't really like what he sees there, not in the least. It does, however, start to stir him, to shake him from the cold foundations on which he'd been resting. He doesn't resist, however; he doesn't have the fight in him to be able to throw Watson off. He doesn't want to struggle; it's horrible to be staring down into Watson's rage, but he doesn't know yet if this is the closest he will get to being allowed in Watson's embrace. He can smell Watson from here, and he smells the same
( ... )
Watson stared at Holmes for a long moment. He released his grip on his clothing, but didn't step away, either. Good God, after all this time, to be this close to Holmes. Even if he was furious with him, it was a heady drug to be near him once more.
"Men don't try to kill me anymore," he said, in a low voice. "Not since you died." And that was true, both blessing and curse. Whatever else life with Holmes had been, it had never been boring.
He drew back fractionally, giving Holmes a searching look. When he spoke, his voice was still hard, but some of the anger had drained out of it. "Why should he want to kill me for that?"
He'd wanted to rehearse this speech in his mind, but every time he'd tried to pen what he was going to say, how he was going to explain this situation, he'd shied away from actually determining how to say it. He knows he doesn't want it to come out painting him some victim; he'd had little choice in the matter, but he hadn't done a very good job of playing the hand that had been dealt to him.
"Because those were the terms of my death," he answers, trying to sound calm, but his voice is more hushed, more revealing than he'd intended. "No one has tried to kill you these last three years because I have let you believe me dead."
He thinks about continuing, about dumping more information onto Watson, but he stops himself there before he goes on. It's the searching look that does it, the lack of anger, and the faint hope that he might be able to salvage something here, that always won't crack under the weight of three years. He doesn't shy away from Watson's eyes now; he gives him a searching look of his own, and prays his desperation
( ... )
None of this made sense to Watson. Why anyone should care so much about whether or not he knew Holmes was alive was beyond him. That his life was now in danger he understood, and he understood the ramifications of that far too well.
"Let me get this straight. Are you seriously telling me that I've grieved for you for these past three years -- grieved, make no mistake about it -- because someone threatened to kill me otherwise?" He was incredulous. It was a mad idea, and he was on the verge of accusing Holmes of lying to him, of trying to make some excuse for his horrendous act. Still, at the same time, he was still caught in the long habit of taking what Holmes said as gospel.
He hadn't considered that Watson wouldn't believe him. When does Watson ever not believe him, once he's demonstrated the trick? He blinks at his questions, a wrinkle in his composure, and he steps back, needing to regroup.
There will come a time he'll tell Watson about how close he came to actually dying, about his time with some monks who managed not just to change his life, but to give him the equipment to take it back for himself. Now is not that time, even if the most accurate answer to Watson's question is that now he's gone sufficiently long enough without yearning to shoot something up his arm.
"Funnily enough, because now he believes me dead. I couldn't set my trap until he abandoned the trail." There isn't anything funny about it, and his tone isn't very light.
When he goes to the sideboard again and pours out another glass of brandy -- for himself this time -- he doesn't even realize it isn't his brandy to pour until the glass is at his lips. He takes a long drink.
Life... went on, after death, as Watson had always known it would inevitably do. There were days he felt but half of himself, but the world wouldn't understand that, so he pulled himself together and found what purpose he could. He wrote, he worked his practice, he spent some time with the Yard, he visited the Lestrades -- in short, he carved himself out some semblance of a new life, with new reasons, and he lived that.
Yet that never stopped him musing over crimes in the papers, wondering what Holmes would have made of them, it never stopped him wanting to hear of work that Lestrade might be involved in that Watson's humble role as a police surgeon did not enter into, it never stopped him missing the feel of Holmes's body in bed beside him. At some point in the last three years he had moved rather more permanently into Holmes's old bedroom, citing that it would be mroe convenient to avoid the stairs to his own, but truly it had just made it easier for him to sleep, ( ... )
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What if, upon discovering the game, he decides Holmes doesn't deserve resurrection?
"It's just that I've seen you a time or two, sir; I have a bookshop at the corner, and when I realized I'd bumped into my neighbor, I thought I ought to come and apologize for my gruff manner. Occupational hazard, sir, to be so involved in my books, and I really wasn't watching where I was going. I only wanted to apologize, sir, and to thank you."
Reply
Still, it was deucedly odd. There were, too, old instincts still in him, from more dangerous days, that told him to be on his toes.
"I trust none of your books were damaged," he said, and truthfully this was something that had concerned him a little. "You needn't have come all this way merely to thank me for picking up your books."
Rather casually, he removed his hat and coat, deposited his stick in its place by the door, and turned back to this stranger, attempting to look carefully neutral.
Reply
"But it wasn't far! And I thought you might enjoy -- you look the sort that reads, sir. I have here a nice assortment -- British Birds, and Catullus, and The Holy War. Something among the lot is bound to strike your interest, and there's a vacancy on your shelf, just there."
He points at a shelf that really isn't lacking any books at all, except it is lacking everything that was his. He's beginning to sweat, he realizes, and the adrenaline floods his system. If only this could stay a performance; if only he could maintain the act, then he might get through this, but in a very few moments he must step off the stage; he isn't sure he's quite ready.
Reply
"I'm afraid that--" Watson turned back, as polite a dismissal as he could manage on his tongue, but stopped short, discovering that the bookseller had entirely vanished. He was, instead, replaced with a wholly remarkable and wholly impossible sight: Sherlock Holmes, in the bookseller's clothes.
His mouth fell open, even as the blood drained visibly from his face. Watson did not believe in ghosts. Potentially this was just him finally losing his mind. While he gave a weak sort of groan instead of any verbal reply, his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed in a dead faint.
Reply
He manages to get Watson over to the sofa, and he hurriedly pours him a brandy. (In the same spot, in the same sideboard; his hands start to tremble, despite himself.)
"Watson?" he asks, returning to his side. "John?" He administers the brandy, frowning deeply.
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Watson coughed and spluttered on the brandy a little; consciousness returned quickly to him. Finding himself moved to the sofa, and Holmes -- mirculously, impossibly Holmes -- peering anxiously over him. This was real. Holmes was alive, against all odds or sense, and here with him.
"Holmes," Watson said, half perplexed, half disbelieving. As he pulled himself up into a half-seated position, two thoughts occurred to him: first, Sherlock Holmes was not and had never been dead; second, Sherlock Holmes had let him believe in his death anyway. The injustice of that stung. It had all been some damned game, some planned deception, for all the talk of always there was no truth behind it at all.
Suddenly furious with the release of three years worth of grief and pain, Watson drew back his fist and flung a punch at Holmes's face; the brandy went flying, but he hardly cared.
Reply
"Watson," he says again, still on the floor, and he takes his hand away from his face once he ascertains no real permanent damage has been done. He struggles for composure; if Watson truly no longer wants him around, then Holmes at least needs to get him through the day, and he'll need to keep himself together.
"I trust you no longer need the brandy."
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"How dare you," he hissed. Watson advanced on him, his face a mask of rage and betrayal and hurt. "How dare you! Three years, Holmes. Three years! After all your talk of 'always' you throw this sort of deception in my face?"
He exhaled sharply through his nose, his face no longer white with horror to be sure.
Reply
He'd been prepared for this, and he's already been struggling with guilt, because he could have defeated Moran sooner. He knows this, is sure of it, but his volatile nature finally bested his mind, and he sunk into a numbing depression that left him exposed and vulnerable. He should've fought harder.
"It wasn't my idea," he says, avoiding Watson's eyes as he adjusts his cuffs. "I hope you have another right hook left, for you'll want it by the end of the evening."
Reply
Advancing, he grabbed Holmes by the shirt, suppressing the urge to simply shake him violently. "How dare you use me like this," he hissed, sounding far more broken than he had as yet, although no less angry. "Am I nothing more than a prop in your mad schemes?"
His eyes were brimming with angry, frustrated tears, which irritated him even further; the last thing he wanted right now was to appear in any way vulnerable. "Give me one good reason," Watson said, "why I shouldn't throw you out of my home right this instant."
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"Men don't try to kill me anymore," he said, in a low voice. "Not since you died." And that was true, both blessing and curse. Whatever else life with Holmes had been, it had never been boring.
He drew back fractionally, giving Holmes a searching look. When he spoke, his voice was still hard, but some of the anger had drained out of it. "Why should he want to kill me for that?"
Reply
"Because those were the terms of my death," he answers, trying to sound calm, but his voice is more hushed, more revealing than he'd intended. "No one has tried to kill you these last three years because I have let you believe me dead."
He thinks about continuing, about dumping more information onto Watson, but he stops himself there before he goes on. It's the searching look that does it, the lack of anger, and the faint hope that he might be able to salvage something here, that always won't crack under the weight of three years. He doesn't shy away from Watson's eyes now; he gives him a searching look of his own, and prays his desperation ( ... )
Reply
"Let me get this straight. Are you seriously telling me that I've grieved for you for these past three years -- grieved, make no mistake about it -- because someone threatened to kill me otherwise?" He was incredulous. It was a mad idea, and he was on the verge of accusing Holmes of lying to him, of trying to make some excuse for his horrendous act. Still, at the same time, he was still caught in the long habit of taking what Holmes said as gospel.
"Fine. Say that I believe you. Why return now?"
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There will come a time he'll tell Watson about how close he came to actually dying, about his time with some monks who managed not just to change his life, but to give him the equipment to take it back for himself. Now is not that time, even if the most accurate answer to Watson's question is that now he's gone sufficiently long enough without yearning to shoot something up his arm.
"Funnily enough, because now he believes me dead. I couldn't set my trap until he abandoned the trail." There isn't anything funny about it, and his tone isn't very light.
When he goes to the sideboard again and pours out another glass of brandy -- for himself this time -- he doesn't even realize it isn't his brandy to pour until the glass is at his lips. He takes a long drink.
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