Chess - A Sanctuary Ficlet
They'd had a standing appointment at the club for as long as he could remember. They'd mingle with the other gentlemen at the club before they settled down in comfortable, leather arm chairs with their brandies in hand and began their routine game of chess.
It had been friendly competition at first, almost lazily moving the pieces about as the conversation took them wherever it would - to John's upcoming wedding, back to their years as schoolmates at Winchester and then Oxford, or some puzzle he'd been struggling to decipher in his work with the Scotland Yard - before it would inevitably end with one or the other of them toasting to their success with a hearty “well played, old boy.”
And then, the Ripper cases came by his attention.
“I can't understand, John, why he hasn't left any physical evidence at the scene. I've never been...blind...like this. Even if it's only a footprint, I'm always able to find something!” He cried in exasperation as he moved one of his Knights.
“Perhaps you've looked in all the wrong places, old boy.” John said, casually countering the move that he'd so easily anticipated. “Perhaps there's something outside the crime scene that will tell you who the killer is.”
“Perhaps you're right,” he'd admitted after a few moments of staring at the chess board. “It's not as if he could disappear from the scene.”
He laughed, though there had been something in John's eye when he'd joined in the laughter that should have told him...
The games became more competitive as the investigation dragged on. Oh, it seemed to the others at the club that things had stayed the same, and even he had been unwilling to recognize the changes that were coming over him and his companion as they began their weekly battle of wits. Perhaps he'd been reacting to John's growing obsession with the game or perhaps he'd wanted to win at something. Either way, they battled on the chessboard as if their lives depended on it.
Suddenly, the conversations didn't turn to polite topics, like weather and literature, or even personal topics like Helen, or their boyhood, or how little either liked the newly vampiric Nikola Tesla. It always turned to the subject of the Ripper killings.
“How many has it been?”
“Seven. If only we could catch the bastard.” He said, uncharacteristically slamming an angry fist on the table.
“Whitechapel, then?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head as he moved his bishop. “He moved her. Over near Wapping. I cannot understand why he would taint his calling card like that. Why do you think he would move her?”
John paused for a moment. “Perhaps the old boy's losing his taste for the sport.”
“Perhaps,” he mused, noncommittally from behind clasped hands as he stared at the chessboard.
“Check.” John announced quietly, the feverish competition waning.
“Damn.” He murmured, staring at the board.
It had been Helen who had reluctantly informed him of John's activities. “His power is what's driving him mad, James,” she had cried, more passionately almost than he'd ever seen her before.
“Madness?” He had roared in the shock of learning that his oldest and dearest friend was the foe with whom he'd been dancing on this last case. “You call murdering seven whores madness?”
She had swallowed bile, probably from the morning sickness she'd tried to hide from them. “It isn't John,” she whispered. “The Source Blood has already changed Nikola. Can't it have done the same to John?”
“It's far too easy to blame this on something else,” he had managed, more compassionately though still enraged. “John Druitt's hand was on the blade that cut those women, and John Druitt is the one that must face justice.”
Her lip trembled, a strange display of emotion for the doctor. “Let me try, James. I have to at least try...”
When John didn't show up for their weekly chess game after the last murder, he knew that it was over and that he had been beaten. And so, he had sat with a glass of brandy in one hand as he stared at the ebony and ivory board. Not only had he lost in the number of games they'd played here, he'd lost at the deductive reasoning he thought he knew so well.
In a moment of sad reflection, James Watson raised his glass to the empty chair across from him. “Well played, old boy.”