The Way Home
Wounds don't mend overnight, but with luck they can heal cleanly.
The Way Home
He has not yet grown used to the fact that he can see Watson almost anytime he pleases, that he can go out in public without a disguise, and as he tugs his friend along through the purple twilight Holmes feels weightless, giddy and drunk on freedom. It's a clear night, for London, a single star flickering low on the horizon. There is a cool damp rising from the river, pooling around their ankles, but the air about their faces is still baked by the brick-oven heat of the city in summer. The Strand flames in the distance. He can hear the whisper of thousands of feet over cobblestones, the murmur of thousands of voices, the remote clatter of cabs and the shouts of their drivers. All the familiar noises of London, washing back and forth, his own dangerous, beautiful sea. And Sherlock Holmes can navigate it like no other. He ducks into a lane that he knows Watson has never seen, prepared to pull him through a maze of mews and alleys and deposit him, breathless and laughing, on his own front stoop. It's a trick Watson never grows tired of. Mary will bite her lip with amusement at the sight of them, invite him in for a tumbler of brandy.
It's darker in the alley, though golden mists of light seep from a few opened upper windows. Quieter. A child laughs several streets over. A piano tinkles brightly.
It's not yet reached the fourth note when he recognizes Die Forelle.
Holmes slams to a halt, dropping Watson's arm. This is the third time he has chanced upon the tune since that night at Moriarty's factory. He can say, as a man who recently became something of an authority on the subject, that the first time was like nothing so much as a plunge over a waterfall: the sick plummeting of his guts and then frozen knife-edge shock like cold water, diaphragm locked even as he tried to gasp for air. By now, however, he has begun to grow familiar with the way the air falls dead in his throat, the way his skin tightens and tingles as though anticipating a blow. He's familiar, too, with the way the sensation rolls over him like a wave, and he rides it out with a minimum of panic, swaying with the momentum like a punch in the ring, letting it overwhelm him and then pass harmlessly by. He takes perhaps four seconds to settle his stomach, get his breath back - and then he catches sight of Watson.
His friend is slumped against the bricks of the alley, taking shallow breaths and shaking from his lips to the ends of his fingers.
Holmes is so accustomed to seeing his own reaction to the piece as a distinctly personal and slightly shameful lack of nerve that he fails spectacularly to make the immediate and obvious connection. Watson is so ghastly white that for a moment Holmes believes he is ill. He starts forward instantly, shoving aside the clamouring, insistent voices that shriek about poison and airguns and when two objects collide, there is always damage of a collateral nature and - no, stop your foolishness. Moriarty is dead. He grasps Watson by the shoulders, and the other man shudders once under his hands and then goes still.
That is when Holmes recognizes that something is terribly wrong.
A sick Watson, an injured Watson, would brush him off with a shaky laugh and a muttered apology for any alarm, a concise medical explanation of the trouble, and a valiant effort at downplaying the severity of his symptoms. This is different. Holmes has seen this before, this frozen stillness like a prey animal deprived of cover, blindly determined that if it only shuts its eyes and remains utterly limp it will not be spotted by the hawk. Early in their acquaintance, only thrice, but memorably. The last occasion was when Watson awoke from a thrashing nightmare about Maiwand.
"Watson," he says, with the low, uninflected tone he learned then, the one that made his friend open his eyes and come back to himself.
Watson does indeed open his eyes - only to seize Holmes 'round the neck and bury his face in Holmes’ coat.
Holmes freezes, elbows thrown wide and palms raised in surrender. Normally he luxuriates in touch - in arms laced together for a public stroll, in fierce good-natured fistfights, in the casual jumble of limbs while he reads the paper on the floor with one shoulder propped against Watson's knee. But Holmes dislikes being embraced with the steadiness of a child who experienced it only as a stiff public formality, and Watson has been good enough to notice the aversion. Until now. It requires an effort of will not to wriggle out of the unexpected hold. He manages it, though, and has just begun patting Watson awkwardly behind one shoulder when his friend gasps “I’m sorry," into the fabric of his coat.
"It's quite all right," he says, relieved, and begins to disengage himself, but Watson only clutches handfuls of his clothing, dragging Holmes closer. "I'm sorry," he repeats. Almost pleading.
Holmes’ head is reeling. "For what are you sorry?" His voice sounds strangled to his own ears.
Watson's back heaves. He is slightly taller than Holmes, which means that by burying his face in the smaller man's chest he is forcing them both to contort oddly. Holmes' chin and cheek are crushed into the bony place where Watson's shoulder meets his sternum, his neck craned awkwardly back so he can breathe. "Watson," he rasps.
Watson refuses to let him go, and Holmes flicks his gaze around the alley, trying to determine what sound or smell was powerful enough to transport his friend back to the Afghan desert. He was always more susceptible to this sort of thing in the summer heat, but if anything it is cooler in this narrow, crooked passage away from the main streets. There was a flicker of heat lightning some minutes ago. But that cannot have been enough; it would not have been enough when Watson first returned to England, and it has been years since he fell victim to anything of the sort. Baffled, Holmes strains his ears for distant thunder. The piano is still playing. It hits a false note, starts again. Watson flinches.
Holmes jerks back, staring. The facts click firmly into place. "It's the song," he says, stupidly.
Watson gropes blindly for the wall, props himself against it. He clenches his eyelids. His fists curl as he tries to get his breathing under control.
"But you weren't hurt," Holmes frets. Watson can't have been hurt. He would have seen it, he would have observed. Holmes casts back to the moment Watson pulled him from the rubble. His face was alright; he seemed to move naturally, and the blood flecked onto his hands was from the hook - wasn't it? It would be just like Watson, to ignore his own injuries in the face of Holmes', and Holmes realizes with a jolt of terror that he cannot recall whether Watson's coat was buttoned (because you weren't exactly in top form at the time, hisses some nasty, insinuating part of his brain), and if he failed to observe one detail he might have failed to observe another, and if Watson hauled him to his feet and half-carried him through that factory and saved his life a hundred times over and all the while something was desperately wrong with him Holmes will never, ever forgive himself--
"You weren't hurt," he pleads. "Watson?"
Watson gives a tiny, miserable shake of his head.
"You're safe," Holmes says, restraining the urge to run his hands over his friend right now, just to be sure. "Then why--"
"You don't understand," Watson gasps. Drowning. "There was nothing - I couldn't - the music, I was right there but I couldn't - Moran put a bullet through my hat at 400 yards in the dark and I couldn't help you if I was dead but I could hear and I didn't - I'm sorry--"
Holmes' jaw drops open. "Dear fellow," he breathes. "That's - just - just take a breath, old chap, there's no cause--"
Watson makes a terrible wounded sound, jerks against the wall as though he's been branded. "Don't." His voice is raw, seething with helpless rage. "I heard you, Holmes--"
"Alright." He holds up his hands, placating. "But I'm fine now, so--"
"You don't scream," his friend whispers. "You don't - I couldn't imagine - I would have done anything, I just wanted it to stop--"
"Stop it. Stop it now, Watson." The words are harsh, but he cannot hear this. It isn't fair. Watson was never supposed to be scarred by Moriarty, not even indirectly. Holmes threw himself into a thundering coffin of icy water to prevent it.
"And then it did stop and I thought--"
"Please, Watson."
"I thought he'd killed you," Watson chokes. "He did kill you, twice, he killed you right in front of me and I didn't stop him."
"That's enough," Holmes says. "He didn't kill me. I'm right here."
"I'm so sorry," Watson says, and Holmes moves without thinking.
He lurches forward, his throat tighter than a vice, and gathers Watson to him. His friend's knees wobble; with a rasp of cotton against brick they both slide down the wall, collapse in a tangle of knees and elbows, and for the first time in his life Holmes wraps his arms around someone without the uncomfortable sensation that it is expected of him, as though it is the most natural thing in the world.
"Alright," he murmurs. Watson's hat is wildly askew, crushed between them with the brim digging into Holmes' ear, so he removes it. Puts his lips in Watson's hair. "Alright," he says again. Watson trembles.
Holmes loathes himself for an instant. Because in all his endless calculations about how to keep Watson safe, it had never once occurred to him what his own safety meant. He was sorry for it - at Reichenbach - that Watson had to see, wished it could have been different even as he was selfishly glad that he would not, after all, die alone. But he had never imagined it could mark Watson in the same brutal way as years of war. Watson had had his wife to go home to. His practice, his friends, his dreams of golden-haired children with Mary's smile. Sherlock Holmes wasn't necessary for any of that.
He would do it all again, if he had to. But it's a particularly cruel irony that in his attempts to keep Watson from harm at Moriarty's hands, he's wounded his friend more deeply than he imagined he could.
He waits. He's not sure how long; his concept of time has shrunk into the space of Watson's breathing. High, irregular gasps gradually settle into something deeper and slower, still unsteady but with a discernible rhythm at least. Finally, with a desperate little gulp, Watson goes limp. There are several seconds of silence before his friend stiffens faintly and tries to pull away.
"What you must think of me," Watson says, with a shaky laugh. "I apologize, Holmes. I don't know where my nerve has gone."
Holmes is reminded inescapably of another shamefaced apology, all those years ago. I saw my own comrades hacked to pieces without losing my nerve, Watson had muttered, still darkened by the Afghan sun but oddly gray about his edges. Transparent from certain angles, like the ghost he so very nearly was. His own reply echoes back to him along some corridor of memory. I can understand, he had said. There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.
With his right arm still curled about Watson's ribs, Holmes raises his left hand and begins unbuttoning his shirt.
Watson lifts his head when Holmes begins squirming one arm free from coat and waistcoat, requiring him to let go of his friend for a moment. He takes a swift breath. "Holmes, you don't--"
"You haven't seen it, have you?" Holmes asks steadily, working at his cravat. "Not since you bandaged me up in Switzerland."
Watson gnaws at his lip.
"High time you did," Holmes says, and drags his shirt down over one shoulder. Angles himself into the weak light trickling out of an upstairs window. "You are my doctor, after all."
The scar is a bold, pink gash where his shoulder meets his chest, slightly depressed from the surrounding skin. It itches occasionally, flushes purple in a hot bath. Twinges when he attempts to fully straighten his arm overhead. It's stunningly insignificant, though, for the amount of suffering it represents. He has a far more impressively ugly one from a spectacularly skinned knee as a child.
Watson appears reluctant to look at it.
Holmes cocks his head at him. "Well, doctor?"
"It looks...good." Watson swallows. "Well-healed. There was no infection?"
"You scrubbed it out with carbolic," Holmes says wryly.
"You dove into a waterfall with a massive puncture wound," Watson counters, with a flat stare.
Holmes clears his throat. "No infection."
Watson raises a tentative hand, probing at the skin with extraordinary gentleness. "Does it still hurt?"
Holmes hesitates. "Occasionally."
"You can't raise your arm completely, can you?"
It's not really a question. Holmes tosses him a sharp glance. "I hadn't thought it was that noticeable."
"It isn't," Watson murmurs. "But I've learned close observation from a fellow who's rather good at it."
"Ah," Holmes says. "Well done, then."
Watson still looks desperately sad. Holmes tugs his shirt closed, nudges the other man with his knee. "Come now," he says. He's not sure what else one says, in this sort of scenario.
"I wish I could have stopped him," Watson says bleakly.
"You did," Holmes says. Humour, perhaps. "You dropped a building on him, in fact. It was most innovative. I'm quite fond of the memory of his expression." He allows the words to tumble out cheerfully, but Watson doesn't smile. Holmes sobers. "You saved my life, Watson. You do know that?"
"I wish I'd managed it sooner," Watson says. His voice creaks like ancient wood.
Holmes knows the feeling. He stopped Moriarty, in the end; but he was too late for Irene, for Ravache, for Sim's brother Rene, for a thousand other lives that Moriarty ended, or ruined. He is accustomed, in his profession, to making things right. To justice and closure, at the very least. But there is nothing that can atone for the magnitude of Moriarty's crimes. The man left a swath of devastation in his wake, like an army that salts the earth it has destroyed; he raked ugly furrows into the very terrain of European politics, and some of them will take lifetimes to mend. It's almost fitting that Holmes should have acquired a scar of his own. He's not given to that type of sentiment, but it seems appropriate in this instance. The Moriarty case was the exception to many rules.
"He ruined lives, Watson," Holmes says. "More than we'll likely ever know. Thirty degrees of motion in my arm is a laughably small thing."
"That isn't the point," Watson says, softly. But he looks fond, now, and not merely sad.
Holmes isn't certain what the point is meant to be. "I can still play the violin," he offers.
Watson shakes his head. "I'm glad," he says. It sounds a bit choked.
Holmes flexes his fingers helplessly. There is nothing he can say that will change the fact that he cannot quite reach the highest bookshelf in Baker Street; that he can recall vividly the highly individual smell of chalk and india ink and macassar oil that was Moriarty, pinning him to the floor while he palmed worn leather and willed his fingers not to quiver; that Watson listens to a pleasant piano tune and hears distorted screams. "Come on, old fellow," he says. "Let me show you a new way home."
He tugs Watson to his feet, fits their elbows tightly together. Sweeps Watson's bowler off the ground and replaces it somewhat rakishly on his head. Automatically, Watson's hand comes up and tips it into a more respectable angle. Holmes can't quite restrain a smile.
Then he pulls Watson down the alley. He drags his friend around corners, over fences, into coiled-spring networks of rookeries where he keeps carefully to the shadows, hiding their fine clothes in the darkness with a delicious tingle of alertness shooting along his veins. They duck beneath lines of laundry. Dodge around tumbled heaps of coal. Flit soundlessly across empty yards. They wind through the surreal dusk until they are both dizzy with it; and still Holmes picks his way unerringly along twisting, crooked alleys, plunging headlong into the maze of London's unnamed streets. He steers and Watson follows, picking up the pace until they are almost running, matching strides with the ease of long experience. The stars are coming out. Holmes drags Watson through a stable where one of the horses snorts and kicks its stall, dashes around a corner piled with old fruit crates, darts through a lane so narrow they have to turn sideways to navigate it -- and all at once they spill out onto Regent Street, blinking and breathless in the soft orange glow of the gas-lamps.
It's quiet on the road. Watson is glancing around them, staring across to Cavendish Place with the pleasantly astonished expression he sometimes wears when Holmes is being brilliant. Holmes stands and catches his breath. He is strangely exhilarated -- as though he's just chased down a suspect, or outrun something.
Watson is afraid of an innocent Schubert song. Holmes is afraid of reckless cab drivers, of patients with influenza, of the myriad faceless strangers who might succeed where the great Napoleon of Crime has failed. But London is still London. He can feel the deep, slow tide of it murmuring in the cobbles beneath his shoes. They sway on it for a moment, like two corks bobbing in an ocean. Or perhaps a white handkerchief, fluttering atop a swell like so much delicate sea spray.
Watson has not stopped gazing about, a faint smile tugging up the ends of his moustache. "Good Lord, Holmes," he chuckles. There is still a deeply etched sadness there, but it's only a trace: like a well-healed scar, or a limp that will never quite fade. "Have you ever been lost in your life?"
"In London? Don't be absurd, old fellow," says Holmes, airily evasive. "One is only lost if he can't find his way back."
The Way Home
He has not yet grown used to the fact that he can see Watson almost anytime he pleases, that he can go out in public without a disguise, and as he tugs his friend along through the purple twilight Holmes feels weightless, giddy and drunk on freedom. It's a clear night, for London, a single star flickering low on the horizon. There is a cool damp rising from the river, pooling around their ankles, but the air about their faces is still baked by the brick-oven heat of the city in summer. The Strand flames in the distance. He can hear the whisper of thousands of feet over cobblestones, the murmur of thousands of voices, the remote clatter of cabs and the shouts of their drivers. All the familiar noises of London, washing back and forth, his own dangerous, beautiful sea. And Sherlock Holmes can navigate it like no other. He ducks into a lane that he knows Watson has never seen, prepared to pull him through a maze of mews and alleys and deposit him, breathless and laughing, on his own front stoop. It's a trick Watson never grows tired of. Mary will bite her lip with amusement at the sight of them, invite him in for a tumbler of brandy.
It's darker in the alley, though golden mists of light seep from a few opened upper windows. Quieter. A child laughs several streets over. A piano tinkles brightly.
It's not yet reached the fourth note when he recognizes Die Forelle.
Holmes slams to a halt, dropping Watson's arm. This is the third time he has chanced upon the tune since that night at Moriarty's factory. He can say, as a man who recently became something of an authority on the subject, that the first time was like nothing so much as a plunge over a waterfall: the sick plummeting of his guts and then frozen knife-edge shock like cold water, diaphragm locked even as he tried to gasp for air. By now, however, he has begun to grow familiar with the way the air falls dead in his throat, the way his skin tightens and tingles as though anticipating a blow. He's familiar, too, with the way the sensation rolls over him like a wave, and he rides it out with a minimum of panic, swaying with the momentum like a punch in the ring, letting it overwhelm him and then pass harmlessly by. He takes perhaps four seconds to settle his stomach, get his breath back - and then he catches sight of Watson.
His friend is slumped against the bricks of the alley, taking shallow breaths and shaking from his lips to the ends of his fingers.
Holmes is so accustomed to seeing his own reaction to the piece as a distinctly personal and slightly shameful lack of nerve that he fails spectacularly to make the immediate and obvious connection. Watson is so ghastly white that for a moment Holmes believes he is ill. He starts forward instantly, shoving aside the clamouring, insistent voices that shriek about poison and airguns and when two objects collide, there is always damage of a collateral nature and - no, stop your foolishness. Moriarty is dead. He grasps Watson by the shoulders, and the other man shudders once under his hands and then goes still.
That is when Holmes recognizes that something is terribly wrong.
A sick Watson, an injured Watson, would brush him off with a shaky laugh and a muttered apology for any alarm, a concise medical explanation of the trouble, and a valiant effort at downplaying the severity of his symptoms. This is different. Holmes has seen this before, this frozen stillness like a prey animal deprived of cover, blindly determined that if it only shuts its eyes and remains utterly limp it will not be spotted by the hawk. Early in their acquaintance, only thrice, but memorably. The last occasion was when Watson awoke from a thrashing nightmare about Maiwand.
"Watson," he says, with the low, uninflected tone he learned then, the one that made his friend open his eyes and come back to himself.
Watson does indeed open his eyes - only to seize Holmes 'round the neck and bury his face in Holmes’ coat.
Holmes freezes, elbows thrown wide and palms raised in surrender. Normally he luxuriates in touch - in arms laced together for a public stroll, in fierce good-natured fistfights, in the casual jumble of limbs while he reads the paper on the floor with one shoulder propped against Watson's knee. But Holmes dislikes being embraced with the steadiness of a child who experienced it only as a stiff public formality, and Watson has been good enough to notice the aversion. Until now. It requires an effort of will not to wriggle out of the unexpected hold. He manages it, though, and has just begun patting Watson awkwardly behind one shoulder when his friend gasps “I’m sorry," into the fabric of his coat.
"It's quite all right," he says, relieved, and begins to disengage himself, but Watson only clutches handfuls of his clothing, dragging Holmes closer. "I'm sorry," he repeats. Almost pleading.
Holmes’ head is reeling. "For what are you sorry?" His voice sounds strangled to his own ears.
Watson's back heaves. He is slightly taller than Holmes, which means that by burying his face in the smaller man's chest he is forcing them both to contort oddly. Holmes' chin and cheek are crushed into the bony place where Watson's shoulder meets his sternum, his neck craned awkwardly back so he can breathe. "Watson," he rasps.
Watson refuses to let him go, and Holmes flicks his gaze around the alley, trying to determine what sound or smell was powerful enough to transport his friend back to the Afghan desert. He was always more susceptible to this sort of thing in the summer heat, but if anything it is cooler in this narrow, crooked passage away from the main streets. There was a flicker of heat lightning some minutes ago. But that cannot have been enough; it would not have been enough when Watson first returned to England, and it has been years since he fell victim to anything of the sort. Baffled, Holmes strains his ears for distant thunder. The piano is still playing. It hits a false note, starts again. Watson flinches.
Holmes jerks back, staring. The facts click firmly into place. "It's the song," he says, stupidly.
Watson gropes blindly for the wall, props himself against it. He clenches his eyelids. His fists curl as he tries to get his breathing under control.
"But you weren't hurt," Holmes frets. Watson can't have been hurt. He would have seen it, he would have observed. Holmes casts back to the moment Watson pulled him from the rubble. His face was alright; he seemed to move naturally, and the blood flecked onto his hands was from the hook - wasn't it? It would be just like Watson, to ignore his own injuries in the face of Holmes', and Holmes realizes with a jolt of terror that he cannot recall whether Watson's coat was buttoned (because you weren't exactly in top form at the time, hisses some nasty, insinuating part of his brain), and if he failed to observe one detail he might have failed to observe another, and if Watson hauled him to his feet and half-carried him through that factory and saved his life a hundred times over and all the while something was desperately wrong with him Holmes will never, ever forgive himself--
"You weren't hurt," he pleads. "Watson?"
Watson gives a tiny, miserable shake of his head.
"You're safe," Holmes says, restraining the urge to run his hands over his friend right now, just to be sure. "Then why--"
"You don't understand," Watson gasps. Drowning. "There was nothing - I couldn't - the music, I was right there but I couldn't - Moran put a bullet through my hat at 400 yards in the dark and I couldn't help you if I was dead but I could hear and I didn't - I'm sorry--"
Holmes' jaw drops open. "Dear fellow," he breathes. "That's - just - just take a breath, old chap, there's no cause--"
Watson makes a terrible wounded sound, jerks against the wall as though he's been branded. "Don't." His voice is raw, seething with helpless rage. "I heard you, Holmes--"
"Alright." He holds up his hands, placating. "But I'm fine now, so--"
"You don't scream," his friend whispers. "You don't - I couldn't imagine - I would have done anything, I just wanted it to stop--"
"Stop it. Stop it now, Watson." The words are harsh, but he cannot hear this. It isn't fair. Watson was never supposed to be scarred by Moriarty, not even indirectly. Holmes threw himself into a thundering coffin of icy water to prevent it.
"And then it did stop and I thought--"
"Please, Watson."
"I thought he'd killed you," Watson chokes. "He did kill you, twice, he killed you right in front of me and I didn't stop him."
"That's enough," Holmes says. "He didn't kill me. I'm right here."
"I'm so sorry," Watson says, and Holmes moves without thinking.
He lurches forward, his throat tighter than a vice, and gathers Watson to him. His friend's knees wobble; with a rasp of cotton against brick they both slide down the wall, collapse in a tangle of knees and elbows, and for the first time in his life Holmes wraps his arms around someone without the uncomfortable sensation that it is expected of him, as though it is the most natural thing in the world.
"Alright," he murmurs. Watson's hat is wildly askew, crushed between them with the brim digging into Holmes' ear, so he removes it. Puts his lips in Watson's hair. "Alright," he says again. Watson trembles.
Holmes loathes himself for an instant. Because in all his endless calculations about how to keep Watson safe, it had never once occurred to him what his own safety meant. He was sorry for it - at Reichenbach - that Watson had to see, wished it could have been different even as he was selfishly glad that he would not, after all, die alone. But he had never imagined it could mark Watson in the same brutal way as years of war. Watson had had his wife to go home to. His practice, his friends, his dreams of golden-haired children with Mary's smile. Sherlock Holmes wasn't necessary for any of that.
He would do it all again, if he had to. But it's a particularly cruel irony that in his attempts to keep Watson from harm at Moriarty's hands, he's wounded his friend more deeply than he imagined he could.
He waits. He's not sure how long; his concept of time has shrunk into the space of Watson's breathing. High, irregular gasps gradually settle into something deeper and slower, still unsteady but with a discernible rhythm at least. Finally, with a desperate little gulp, Watson goes limp. There are several seconds of silence before his friend stiffens faintly and tries to pull away.
"What you must think of me," Watson says, with a shaky laugh. "I apologize, Holmes. I don't know where my nerve has gone."
Holmes is reminded inescapably of another shamefaced apology, all those years ago. I saw my own comrades hacked to pieces without losing my nerve, Watson had muttered, still darkened by the Afghan sun but oddly gray about his edges. Transparent from certain angles, like the ghost he so very nearly was. His own reply echoes back to him along some corridor of memory. I can understand, he had said. There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.
With his right arm still curled about Watson's ribs, Holmes raises his left hand and begins unbuttoning his shirt.
Watson lifts his head when Holmes begins squirming one arm free from coat and waistcoat, requiring him to let go of his friend for a moment. He takes a swift breath. "Holmes, you don't--"
"You haven't seen it, have you?" Holmes asks steadily, working at his cravat. "Not since you bandaged me up in Switzerland."
Watson gnaws at his lip.
"High time you did," Holmes says, and drags his shirt down over one shoulder. Angles himself into the weak light trickling out of an upstairs window. "You are my doctor, after all."
The scar is a bold, pink gash where his shoulder meets his chest, slightly depressed from the surrounding skin. It itches occasionally, flushes purple in a hot bath. Twinges when he attempts to fully straighten his arm overhead. It's stunningly insignificant, though, for the amount of suffering it represents. He has a far more impressively ugly one from a spectacularly skinned knee as a child.
Watson appears reluctant to look at it.
Holmes cocks his head at him. "Well, doctor?"
"It looks...good." Watson swallows. "Well-healed. There was no infection?"
"You scrubbed it out with carbolic," Holmes says wryly.
"You dove into a waterfall with a massive puncture wound," Watson counters, with a flat stare.
Holmes clears his throat. "No infection."
Watson raises a tentative hand, probing at the skin with extraordinary gentleness. "Does it still hurt?"
Holmes hesitates. "Occasionally."
"You can't raise your arm completely, can you?"
It's not really a question. Holmes tosses him a sharp glance. "I hadn't thought it was that noticeable."
"It isn't," Watson murmurs. "But I've learned close observation from a fellow who's rather good at it."
"Ah," Holmes says. "Well done, then."
Watson still looks desperately sad. Holmes tugs his shirt closed, nudges the other man with his knee. "Come now," he says. He's not sure what else one says, in this sort of scenario.
"I wish I could have stopped him," Watson says bleakly.
"You did," Holmes says. Humour, perhaps. "You dropped a building on him, in fact. It was most innovative. I'm quite fond of the memory of his expression." He allows the words to tumble out cheerfully, but Watson doesn't smile. Holmes sobers. "You saved my life, Watson. You do know that?"
"I wish I'd managed it sooner," Watson says. His voice creaks like ancient wood.
Holmes knows the feeling. He stopped Moriarty, in the end; but he was too late for Irene, for Ravache, for Sim's brother Rene, for a thousand other lives that Moriarty ended, or ruined. He is accustomed, in his profession, to making things right. To justice and closure, at the very least. But there is nothing that can atone for the magnitude of Moriarty's crimes. The man left a swath of devastation in his wake, like an army that salts the earth it has destroyed; he raked ugly furrows into the very terrain of European politics, and some of them will take lifetimes to mend. It's almost fitting that Holmes should have acquired a scar of his own. He's not given to that type of sentiment, but it seems appropriate in this instance. The Moriarty case was the exception to many rules.
"He ruined lives, Watson," Holmes says. "More than we'll likely ever know. Thirty degrees of motion in my arm is a laughably small thing."
"That isn't the point," Watson says, softly. But he looks fond, now, and not merely sad.
Holmes isn't certain what the point is meant to be. "I can still play the violin," he offers.
Watson shakes his head. "I'm glad," he says. It sounds a bit choked.
Holmes flexes his fingers helplessly. There is nothing he can say that will change the fact that he cannot quite reach the highest bookshelf in Baker Street; that he can recall vividly the highly individual smell of chalk and india ink and macassar oil that was Moriarty, pinning him to the floor while he palmed worn leather and willed his fingers not to quiver; that Watson listens to a pleasant piano tune and hears distorted screams. "Come on, old fellow," he says. "Let me show you a new way home."
He tugs Watson to his feet, fits their elbows tightly together. Sweeps Watson's bowler off the ground and replaces it somewhat rakishly on his head. Automatically, Watson's hand comes up and tips it into a more respectable angle. Holmes can't quite restrain a smile.
Then he pulls Watson down the alley. He drags his friend around corners, over fences, into coiled-spring networks of rookeries where he keeps carefully to the shadows, hiding their fine clothes in the darkness with a delicious tingle of alertness shooting along his veins. They duck beneath lines of laundry. Dodge around tumbled heaps of coal. Flit soundlessly across empty yards. They wind through the surreal dusk until they are both dizzy with it; and still Holmes picks his way unerringly along twisting, crooked alleys, plunging headlong into the maze of London's unnamed streets. He steers and Watson follows, picking up the pace until they are almost running, matching strides with the ease of long experience. The stars are coming out. Holmes drags Watson through a stable where one of the horses snorts and kicks its stall, dashes around a corner piled with old fruit crates, darts through a lane so narrow they have to turn sideways to navigate it -- and all at once they spill out onto Regent Street, blinking and breathless in the soft orange glow of the gas-lamps.
It's quiet on the road. Watson is glancing around them, staring across to Cavendish Place with the pleasantly astonished expression he sometimes wears when Holmes is being brilliant. Holmes stands and catches his breath. He is strangely exhilarated -- as though he's just chased down a suspect, or outrun something.
Watson is afraid of an innocent Schubert song. Holmes is afraid of reckless cab drivers, of patients with influenza, of the myriad faceless strangers who might succeed where the great Napoleon of Crime has failed. But London is still London. He can feel the deep, slow tide of it murmuring in the cobbles beneath his shoes. They sway on it for a moment, like two corks bobbing in an ocean. Or perhaps a white handkerchief, fluttering atop a swell like so much delicate sea spray.
Watson has not stopped gazing about, a faint smile tugging up the ends of his moustache. "Good Lord, Holmes," he chuckles. There is still a deeply etched sadness there, but it's only a trace: like a well-healed scar, or a limp that will never quite fade. "Have you ever been lost in your life?"
"In London? Don't be absurd, old fellow," says Holmes, airily evasive. "One is only lost if he can't find his way back."