The Wake
The Wake
Author(s): serenusc
Rating: G
Character(s): Mycroft Holmes.
Summary: He had no gills for it, either.
Warnings: OOC Mycroft Holmes
Word Count: 1023
Author's Notes: really random. Unbetaed. Set after "The Final Problem". Watson in absentia.
Dear Sherlock,
If you are reading this, then you've indeed acquired supernatural powers, for I have no intentions of ever writing this down. I am most emphatically not going to complain to you when I have the first opportunity of doing so about the difficulties you put me through, dying so unexpectedly and leaving so many loose ends behind. According to my calculations, by now you have already seen for yourself how inconvenient an untimely demise is; that is, if you aren't lying in some other chasm, having experienced poetic justice firsthand. As I have yet to receive a notification from the redoubtable Colonel Moran, I rather suspect you're still evading his unwavering aim. Please do not trouble yourself on my behalf. I have tidied up so many things in the short time since you've gone MIA, that had Moran actually boasted of your ascertained death, I'd have charged him for the delay.
As you have probably envisioned in your fitful dreams of a fugitive, everyone who had been informed of your fatal duel with the Napoleon of crime (I suppose I should thank you for not duelling in England and breaking the law again - what happens in Switzerland stays in Switzerland; and for allowing me the mind-rotting pleasure of guessing when would I receive another missive of yours), as the good Doctor insisted you called Pr. Moriarty (have you no taste?), and several individuals who shouldn't have, but somehow got wind that you were to be interred (fancy their disappointment, he, he), have gathered today to say their farewells to your coffin.
Since I know for sure you were not present, but have a general idea of what a funeral looks like, I will not tire you with describing the bleakness of light, the sharpness of wind, the grieving of your friends, of whom policemen seem to constitute a disturbing amount, and the speech of Doctor Watson, read by his wife since he lost his voice at the very beginning. By the end of the eulogy I could have proposed to her out of pure respect. I don't know how you did it, but she appears to mourn you genially.
There weren't many attendants, Sherlock, only several officials from Scotland Yard, coughing into their sleeves (I recognised them all from the descriptions in the journals) and a handful of weirdoes: a man stinking of dog piss brought a mongrel which wailed over the priest's mumbling; a surgeon from St. Bartholomew's hospital kept checking whether his medical bag was where he'd put it - he left immediately upon the service, embracing an unresponsive Dr. Watson; a bevy of (I hope) your former clientesses who dabbed at their eyes so often there was always a hankie in motion; your landlady, standing so straight she would have shamed a Whitehall butler; and a band of street urchins who never blinked. I hardly noticed them at all, they were so quiet.
Truly, then, you weren't as much of a free artist as you'd liked to pretend. Were I in your shoes, I'd feel much honoured by their devotion, besides unbearably sore of feet.
When we gathered for a wake at your place, it was the most disastrous wake to imagine.
The workers who had just finished repairing the damage to your window and bookshelves you had had no time to fix before departing, were waiting for Mrs. Hudson, and at the sight of the brutes she displayed the fearlessness born out of watching your various disguises dance across her threshold; she paid them, warned them about being late for dinner (habit is really a second nature), and ignored the black patches left by their sitting on the stairs.
Having been reminded about the fire in your lodgings, she got upset and irritated that she could not treat us properly.
'Oh, the gentlemen won't mind,' said Mrs. Watson with a sad smile. 'Let me help you; I'm sure we'll fit in even if the sofa is ruined.'
'But the soot!' Mrs. Hudson worried. 'No, Mary; you wait downstairs, I'll check the room myself. You shouldn't breath that.'
Mrs. Watson acquiesced, though I somehow thought that weeks of unrestricted air circulation wouldn't have left a trace of the smoke. Unless you had been experimenting, in which case blaming it all on a super-secret criminal organisation and disappearing from the face of the earth had been a stroke of genius on your part.
Then I saw how she seemed to never get warm even near the stove, and how her cheeks were so daintily rosy against the paleness of her face.
I understood at last the too-old despair in Dr Watson's eyes. You must have known it before you went to the Continent; surely he told you, or you saw it for yourself that night I posed for your personal cabman?.. If only I had a heart, I'd find you and kill you with my bare hands.
I admit to being amused by your landlady's laudations to your noble self. Did you know you'd been the most sentimental person she ever knew? And that a perfectly logical conclusion she drew from the heaps of keepsakes, mementoes and trophies she regularly uncovered! Don't underestimate women, they have the eyes of a fox and similar brain-processes.
Then the rat-faced one, Lestrade, has waxed melancholy after two cups of tea, not even a drop of spirit in it, and sighed a gust of his miasma in my direction. I have to give him credit for accuracy, if not for discretion. A pall hung over the table, and MacSomething - the Doctor calls him "Mr. Mac", they being two Scots among us Southerners, though despite the Inspector doesn't protest it I doubt he likes such familiarity, judging by the pained rictus he wears when so addressed - muttered that "Mr. Holmes should have drown the scoundrel and climbed out". To my right sat that rotund little fellow who so loves his Surrey that I have yet to bribe him out of the Police Force; he replied that "poor man hadna gills for it."
And so, Sherlock, you hadn't.
Author(s): serenusc
Rating: G
Character(s): Mycroft Holmes.
Summary: He had no gills for it, either.
Warnings: OOC Mycroft Holmes
Word Count: 1023
Author's Notes: really random. Unbetaed. Set after "The Final Problem". Watson in absentia.
Dear Sherlock,
If you are reading this, then you've indeed acquired supernatural powers, for I have no intentions of ever writing this down. I am most emphatically not going to complain to you when I have the first opportunity of doing so about the difficulties you put me through, dying so unexpectedly and leaving so many loose ends behind. According to my calculations, by now you have already seen for yourself how inconvenient an untimely demise is; that is, if you aren't lying in some other chasm, having experienced poetic justice firsthand. As I have yet to receive a notification from the redoubtable Colonel Moran, I rather suspect you're still evading his unwavering aim. Please do not trouble yourself on my behalf. I have tidied up so many things in the short time since you've gone MIA, that had Moran actually boasted of your ascertained death, I'd have charged him for the delay.
As you have probably envisioned in your fitful dreams of a fugitive, everyone who had been informed of your fatal duel with the Napoleon of crime (I suppose I should thank you for not duelling in England and breaking the law again - what happens in Switzerland stays in Switzerland; and for allowing me the mind-rotting pleasure of guessing when would I receive another missive of yours), as the good Doctor insisted you called Pr. Moriarty (have you no taste?), and several individuals who shouldn't have, but somehow got wind that you were to be interred (fancy their disappointment, he, he), have gathered today to say their farewells to your coffin.
Since I know for sure you were not present, but have a general idea of what a funeral looks like, I will not tire you with describing the bleakness of light, the sharpness of wind, the grieving of your friends, of whom policemen seem to constitute a disturbing amount, and the speech of Doctor Watson, read by his wife since he lost his voice at the very beginning. By the end of the eulogy I could have proposed to her out of pure respect. I don't know how you did it, but she appears to mourn you genially.
There weren't many attendants, Sherlock, only several officials from Scotland Yard, coughing into their sleeves (I recognised them all from the descriptions in the journals) and a handful of weirdoes: a man stinking of dog piss brought a mongrel which wailed over the priest's mumbling; a surgeon from St. Bartholomew's hospital kept checking whether his medical bag was where he'd put it - he left immediately upon the service, embracing an unresponsive Dr. Watson; a bevy of (I hope) your former clientesses who dabbed at their eyes so often there was always a hankie in motion; your landlady, standing so straight she would have shamed a Whitehall butler; and a band of street urchins who never blinked. I hardly noticed them at all, they were so quiet.
Truly, then, you weren't as much of a free artist as you'd liked to pretend. Were I in your shoes, I'd feel much honoured by their devotion, besides unbearably sore of feet.
When we gathered for a wake at your place, it was the most disastrous wake to imagine.
The workers who had just finished repairing the damage to your window and bookshelves you had had no time to fix before departing, were waiting for Mrs. Hudson, and at the sight of the brutes she displayed the fearlessness born out of watching your various disguises dance across her threshold; she paid them, warned them about being late for dinner (habit is really a second nature), and ignored the black patches left by their sitting on the stairs.
Having been reminded about the fire in your lodgings, she got upset and irritated that she could not treat us properly.
'Oh, the gentlemen won't mind,' said Mrs. Watson with a sad smile. 'Let me help you; I'm sure we'll fit in even if the sofa is ruined.'
'But the soot!' Mrs. Hudson worried. 'No, Mary; you wait downstairs, I'll check the room myself. You shouldn't breath that.'
Mrs. Watson acquiesced, though I somehow thought that weeks of unrestricted air circulation wouldn't have left a trace of the smoke. Unless you had been experimenting, in which case blaming it all on a super-secret criminal organisation and disappearing from the face of the earth had been a stroke of genius on your part.
Then I saw how she seemed to never get warm even near the stove, and how her cheeks were so daintily rosy against the paleness of her face.
I understood at last the too-old despair in Dr Watson's eyes. You must have known it before you went to the Continent; surely he told you, or you saw it for yourself that night I posed for your personal cabman?.. If only I had a heart, I'd find you and kill you with my bare hands.
I admit to being amused by your landlady's laudations to your noble self. Did you know you'd been the most sentimental person she ever knew? And that a perfectly logical conclusion she drew from the heaps of keepsakes, mementoes and trophies she regularly uncovered! Don't underestimate women, they have the eyes of a fox and similar brain-processes.
Then the rat-faced one, Lestrade, has waxed melancholy after two cups of tea, not even a drop of spirit in it, and sighed a gust of his miasma in my direction. I have to give him credit for accuracy, if not for discretion. A pall hung over the table, and MacSomething - the Doctor calls him "Mr. Mac", they being two Scots among us Southerners, though despite the Inspector doesn't protest it I doubt he likes such familiarity, judging by the pained rictus he wears when so addressed - muttered that "Mr. Holmes should have drown the scoundrel and climbed out". To my right sat that rotund little fellow who so loves his Surrey that I have yet to bribe him out of the Police Force; he replied that "poor man hadna gills for it."
And so, Sherlock, you hadn't.