Fic: Castrato
Title:Castrato
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Written for Kinkmeme prompt- eunuch.
Everyone has read the stories. Everyone in this world knows Sherlock Holmes; the eccentric, the genius. A lucky few know his smile, his laughter, his great heart. No one ever thinks of the man he once was. No one asks what dark secrets forged the man he became.
“I must admit I am tempted to leave my story there.”
Watson watched as he raised his hand in a dismissive gesture, long white fingers catching the firelight, but the look in his grey eyes betrayed the seriousness with which he held the information. “But to omit such facts as these when I have already revealed so much seems, petty, like I am putting undo worth on secrets you may have already guessed at.” For the first time since the story had begun anew grey eyes focused on him, there was the slightest twist to his lips, like a smile.
“Then again perhaps not.”
“Really Holmes!” Watson tried to sound indignant at the feigned insult but he was surprised how easily the laughter filled his own voice. How so little had changed between them in the last few hours when every revelation and second meant so much, how no amount of tragedy could change the way Sherlock Holmes could make him feel.
Holmes was smiling at him, really smiling, that teasing one that made his heart hammer in his chest and now made him wonder if anyone else had ever had the privilege of seeing it. In a deep jealous part of himself he hoped no one else had ever been granted this, that this part of Holmes belonged exclusively to him.
He was staring again as he had been doing so often lately, it had become something of a bad habit. Watching Holmes, examining his every reaction, but now the time of wondering why had passed. He took this break in the story, this silent laughter he could not look away from without busying himself, to put another log on the fire, letting the warm flames lick over his chilled body for a moment too long before returning to his seat and finding that the humor had died from his friends face. That Holmes sat lost in himself once more, his eyes staring somewhere far off, somewhere years into the past in a place Watson did not yet exist.
“Holmes?” A raise of his eyebrows was all he received as he pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders, suddenly cold. “You were older then that when we met. Did you live with others before me?”
“No.” The same quark of a smile haunted his lips like a ghost. “You were, and are the only one. I found that finding a person to share my rooms with me would be infinitely more difficult than finding them.”
“ Mycroft would have been happy to give me the rent and allow me to live alone indefinitely , money was no longer an object for him, his position afforded him his wants and I was his only indulgence. This situation would have been unbearable to me, I already owed him my continued existence. We came to a compromise, he would pay the other half of the rent until such a time that I found the person with which to share them. This arrangement left me feeling like less of an invalid and still gave him some rein of control over my life when our relationship was still so new that he feared that out of pride I would choose the first person available and thus release him from his binds.
Between Mycroft’s circle of colleagues and acquaintances and my own from lab and university there was an unending parade of potential borders. Men watching my brothers political rise accosted me in hopes of getting to him, people having difficulty with experiments approached me in the hopes that I could assist them and others came simply for want of a place to stay. Each man I gave an extensive interview, watching as their stories deviated from my own deductions. I read faces as false as my own. I listened to the meek and the confident alike and in each of them I read something that I could not tolerate. Their faults were rarely as bad as my own but I could not fathom living with them, sharing my life with their unworthy minds.
I began to understand why Mycroft lived alone, why he dealt with men during the day and shared his life with no one, his adventures unspoken of, untold. As the months passed and the hopefuls melted away into shadow I forgot my original attempts at an almost normal life. I threw myself into my work, my cases were growing by the month, becoming more interesting, more challenging, my life was forming under my hands in the precise way I wanted. My chemical experiments were consuming me. I had passed on no less than three cases that year that could have been solved if a splotch or stain could have been identified as blood and I knew I was getting close to an answer. I had already refabricated my notes from Italy, it was coming to the point that I was in need of blood more than time. I remember how my left arm was covered in plasters with all the pricks I had taken from it, I imagined that to the unobservant eye the little bandages hid the fading scars from once shattered arm.
And now the two characters meet, the little boy grown and becomes the man you know, a past and a present rectified. Yes, I can see the recognition on your face and the way I was correct, you never thought twice about all of those bandages for such little wounds.
I have come at last to the conclusion of my sordid history. The day my experiments with hemoglobin at last came to fruition. The day that I met you.
I had taken several classes with Stanford in the past, he was never the most brilliant of students, always remaining firmly in middle of the pack but he was dim enough to be amiable to almost anyone he ever met. I never took particular care to hide my peculiarities at this point in time; I can still recall with perfect clarity some of the spectacular faces I inspired in him with my more erroneous outbursts. When he walked in the door that day only moments after I had verified my success with the obvious intent of speaking to me I could not rein in my excitement.
Of course I saw you standing there, thin as a waif and brown as a nut as you would put it later, but I was consumed with my work, with testing my compound one final time. I made as series of observations and deductions about you so quickly in my subconscious that I was not even aware of the steps I was taking, it was as if you had walked in and handed me a synopsis of your recent past and yet I had not let you say a single word.
When again the test worked, when I held in my hands my success and the guarantee that I could be financially independent from Mycroft I saw you for what was truly the first time. Stanford had one of those looks upon his face, as if I had stepped off the edge of the world and I had reemerged with all of the demons of hell on my heels and you stood there next to him and yet a world apart. Where in him I had inspired near horror and bewilderment in you there was unbridled, pure, amusement. You were repressing the laughter shining in your eyes and yet there was something intelligent lingering beneath it, an appreciation of the work I had done, an appreciation of me.
All of my deductive reasoning failed me. All the classes I had taken, the years of studying people and striving to understand them and I had no idea why I wanted you to stay just like that, joy filling your wounded body, with me, forever.
You were the first irrational decision I made in my entire life.
When you said you were looking for rooms I did not want to interrogate you as I did the others, I did not need to know a single thing more. You had a reality and kindness about you that none of the others had had, it was as if they were marching blindly through life as you were just stumbling into it.
I did not want to give you the chance to slip away.
I went to Mycroft that night, as soon as you left me, and told him everything. I always believed that when I found a flat mate my brother would insist on meeting them, to observe for himself how we interacted together, to assure himself in his protective manner that I was not at last giving up on the life I had chosen. I should have known from that moment that something astounding was happening, because he did not insist, he saw something in the way I spoke about you even then.
You must promise to forgive me my little lies I felt so necessary at the beginning. By that point Mrs. Hudson had grown fond of me despite of myself and when I requested that she show us the rooms together as if I had only just visited her for the first time recently she agreed. I did not want you to know the peculiar circumstances under which I was staying in the rooms, no need to make all the wrong questions arise between us. It was her idea to move my few personal things downstairs for the time being and say that the few pieces I had brought with me were part of the suite. She always has enjoyed her little parts in my strange adventures, moving here has ruined me for any other place.
Do you remember that first ride we shared together to Baker Street, our knees knocking together like little boys? The little speech of faults I had prepared for you just to see you laugh, to see the strange reactions you had to my insanity? The way I nearly lost myself into the way I did not have to rein myself in around you.
I cannot remember a day in my life before that in which I laughed so much.
You may not believe it but before that day with Stanford in the lab I had rarely felt the need to explain any of my successes to my peers. Of course I would feel the first thrill of brilliance, the yearning to share, to have an audience. I would be enveloped in the sound of a sonata I had completed, the delicate traces of clues through a tangled and convoluted web, the relations of two chemicals and the resounding implications. And I would get no further than a few words, a sentence or two and their faces would drop and their eyes would look into nothing and I knew it did not matter what I said, that my joy was only my own. Something to be locked away somewhere safe and private because no one else could hope to appreciate it the way I did.
And then you came to me.
You watched me with wide eyes as we wandered these empty rooms and the boxes of your things appeared on the stairs. You listened to my stories and explanations, no matter what the topic you never shied away from it, never coming up with the reaction I would have expected. You have always had the inexplicable ability to ask the perfect question, to wonder about the one thing I would not have considered. You inspired genius in me.
In those first few weeks where you never asked the questions burning on your tongue I reveled in your examination of me. Every moment you evaluated me I was learning to be the man you now know. I was learning how to live with someone who brought out the best in me.
I know that you view those early days with a contempt for your own physical weakness, the way your shattered nerves had you on edge, made you cry out in your sleep, but it meant more to me then you could ever understand. All it took was the touch of my hand on your shoulder and I could draw a smile from you as if for an instant I was something divine. When I learned to link my arm through yours without a word, when I could see you begin to tremble, you looked on me as a friend. Although we never spoke of our pasts, when we were together like that it felt as if it did not matter.
I thought of telling you, when you began to notice those inescapable details. How despite the flood of clients no friends ever called on me. How while the rest of our peers were pairing off at an alarming rate we remained closeted in our rooms with Mrs. Hudson being the only lady I allowed into our lives. Perhaps even the way I could spend hours on the settee in the living room and no shadow of hair would ever mar my cheeks. But by then we had become partners.
You looked at me the way no one ever had, with a respect and wonder I had never dreamed possible in the course of my life. You were singular to me, the one person I had ever known that saw me for what I was instead of the castrati that I had been made. To you I was the detective and the chemist, I was the eccentric genius with mad experiments and somehow none of that was repellent. To you I was the friend with whom you had grand adventures like the storybooks you read. You saw the man you had grown to know, the person I had become.
You had become my only friend. My most intimate companion.
I could not chance destroying that for something as insignificant as my past, no matter how much you wished I would.
That all changed of course.
You could never walk away from an injury, physical or otherwise once you knew of its existence. I had to hide my mutilations from you when you treated my leg and I could see you take on the pain you perceived in me in my actions. I watched as the only true friendship in my life, the most pivotal decision I had ever made, became infected with pity and wondering. I watched you plan your ill conceived plans, I let you conduct your experiments on me and I did not have the heart to derail you.
To be honest, I did not think it would break me so easily. I underestimated the power you have over me which I am powerless to combat.
I did not think that after my life so gentle a touch as yours would be the one to break me.”
Throughout the tale Holmes had been as impartial as if it was a story he had once read, a plotline of morbid creation, something factual and unemotional as the weather. The emphasis lay in the right places, the inflection rang true, but it was told with empathy, not personal emotion. As if he could really tell the whole thing and emerge the same man.
But now that it was over his long limbs seemed to fold tighter together, knees held tight against his chest, the blanket falling open and revealing a sliver of porcelain skin, his dark meticulous hair falling into his face haphazardly. As if he was shrinking in on himself, pulling himself in, trying to disappear into his great mind and forgetting that he left the physical world behind. Grey eyes which had always shone with life and brilliance were becoming distant and hazed as a drug coma.
Now that the last strains of the story had finally been told there was nothing left of him, as if the story had pulled its life from him, brutalizing him with every stolen and coerced word.
Watson recognized the look. The way he held himself was something dangerously close to his own heart.
Like trying to explain how it felt to watch bullets destroy youthful flesh in the battlefield, to explain the sensation of molten lead impacting with his body and shattering bone in the safety of the hospital and then trying to pretend as if your very essence had not been exposed and splayed for examination. Like every fiber of your being was pulling in a thousand different directions and you are teetering on the edge of explosion and oblivion and the only way to escape it is to give up utterly.
“Holmes.” Grey eyes flicked to him for but a moment and then away again as if they could not bear the sight of him, could not look into eyes now created to be his perfect judge. Watson ignored the dull throb in his leg. The wet material clung to the scar tissue of his thigh, tacky against his skin as he leaned forward, his hand stretching out as if to touch and then retracting. The blanket covering his own shoulders slipped lower, scratching against the ragged edges of white nerveless tissue like a spider web of shattered glass. “What is it that you think will happen now that I know?”
Something, some indefinable dark emotion flickered across his friends face so quickly he almost missed it, a self-deprecating smirk, a pained grimace, profound sadness. Incommunicable pain rearing its head before being swallowed down, hidden away to where his secrets once lingered but now the scar tissue had been ripped afresh and copied into foreign minds.
“You say ‘think’ as if I have nothing more than a guess.” Long fingers danced an erratic pattern, what would be random with any other to him would be a lost sonata or the Morse code of a message only he could understand, lost against the black of his pants and the fickle trick of time. His arms were pulled taught, wiry muscles straining silently as if he held himself together by force, actions normally hidden by long sleeves and layers of clothing captivating the eye. “As if reason and logic do not create the deductions and possible futures coursing through my mind.” He took a deep breath, filling his slender chest, his eyes sinking closed as he deflated with the exhalation. His voice became that well known rise and fall of the explanation of a worthy case, the threads of clues coming together to form a final obvious truth.
“I cannot, of course, tell you the imminent future but I can give you a breakdown of what will is most likely to transpire between us. The future that I failed to prevent despite myself.” The rhythm of his unheard song changed, the pattern of his fingers slowing, each motion and curve of a knuckle seeming to span entire heartbeats. Moonlight Sonata.
“At first you will act as if nothing has changed and for awhile it will even feel as if this is true, you will look at the future I predict now and you will smile to yourself and think of how melodramatic and pessimistic I was. This period will span days, time I assure you I will not waste. We will have breakfast together every day, we will attend the theater, dinner, perhaps a case will come our way and we will go out together as we have for so many years. Then, one day you will wake, the shock will have worn off and all of the details which once meant nothing will impress themselves upon you.
You will touch my hand and my skin will seem too soft, when I speak you will hear the soft inevitable tinge of youthfulness and height that you had never perceived before you knew to look. You will change the way you are with me. You will not mean to, I would never accuse you of that, never imagine you so cruel. But where you once saw infallibility you will see flaws. You will interpret my actions through the new lens through which you will view me. My word will become less omnipotent, you will question our adventures, imagine reasons for the way I treat clients. You will give reasons for my actions in a way that before where too shrouded in mystery to interpret.
It may take the passage of weeks, months or even years but you will progressively distance yourself from me. Your stories in the Strand will taper off, you will take on more clients as a doctor and more and more often my requests for your company will be, regretfully, denied.
Others will start to remind you of me. The ragged youth on the corner calling out in a sweet high voice the newest headline. The couple holding hands in your office, one hand on a swollen belly and the evidence of the next generation, the things I am incapable of having but still exist for you.
You will find a girl. You will insist it is love, or at the very least that she is a good woman. You will get engaged and all of your spare time will be spent courting her.
You will reassure me that you will visit, that it will be as if nothing has changed at all.
By the time you officially move out of Baker Street you will barely notice my absence.
I will become the friend that you invite to Sunday dinner, the one that lingers after dinner for another drink and a single cigarette without the presence of your wife just to pretend that we still know each other. To pretend that the silences in which we stand do not hold more meaning now than the words we share.
I will be the name brought up on a distant Sunday by your smiling wife as she tells you to invite me to dinner. You will have every intention of doing so, before a patient calls on you. And another. And another. Until the day is gone and I am nothing but a lingering feeling of forgetfulness haunting the back of your mind.
Years will pass. You will read my name in the papers and maybe this night will have faded from your memory entirely. You will remember our days together as fondly as a dream. You will remember us as we are in the stories you captured us in.
We will age, our bodies will deteriorate and those around us will suffer similar fates. Some will die young, some will move away and others will grow up. Perhaps you will be on wife number two when we find our paths come together again.
You will be rushing off on an errand, off your usual path but well within the monotony of your accustomed life when you see me. At first you will not know me, an almost familiar face in the haze of decades. And then you will see me through the years.
You might nod at me and contemplate moving past me but you will condemn the thought a moment later. Your smile when our hands grasp tight will be genuine and fond. You will say how sorry you are that you have to run and you will propose drinks together soon. In that moment you will mean every word.
Alone in the darkness of you room that night, your wife off put by your dour mood, you will hold a note written to me- and you will crumple it and put it in the bin with all of the half written notes inscribed with my name and you will think to yourself that it was silly to imagine that you could go back. Even for a drink. Even for just a stolen moment.
I will understand when I do not hear from you. I will not blame you but neither will I write you.
If we see each other again as we age we will smile, share a word, and disappear.”
A/N: We are almost at the end of this unintentional bohemouth. I know how much this sounds like an ending but hold on, the best is definetly yet to come.
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Written for Kinkmeme prompt- eunuch.
Everyone has read the stories. Everyone in this world knows Sherlock Holmes; the eccentric, the genius. A lucky few know his smile, his laughter, his great heart. No one ever thinks of the man he once was. No one asks what dark secrets forged the man he became.
“I must admit I am tempted to leave my story there.”
Watson watched as he raised his hand in a dismissive gesture, long white fingers catching the firelight, but the look in his grey eyes betrayed the seriousness with which he held the information. “But to omit such facts as these when I have already revealed so much seems, petty, like I am putting undo worth on secrets you may have already guessed at.” For the first time since the story had begun anew grey eyes focused on him, there was the slightest twist to his lips, like a smile.
“Then again perhaps not.”
“Really Holmes!” Watson tried to sound indignant at the feigned insult but he was surprised how easily the laughter filled his own voice. How so little had changed between them in the last few hours when every revelation and second meant so much, how no amount of tragedy could change the way Sherlock Holmes could make him feel.
Holmes was smiling at him, really smiling, that teasing one that made his heart hammer in his chest and now made him wonder if anyone else had ever had the privilege of seeing it. In a deep jealous part of himself he hoped no one else had ever been granted this, that this part of Holmes belonged exclusively to him.
He was staring again as he had been doing so often lately, it had become something of a bad habit. Watching Holmes, examining his every reaction, but now the time of wondering why had passed. He took this break in the story, this silent laughter he could not look away from without busying himself, to put another log on the fire, letting the warm flames lick over his chilled body for a moment too long before returning to his seat and finding that the humor had died from his friends face. That Holmes sat lost in himself once more, his eyes staring somewhere far off, somewhere years into the past in a place Watson did not yet exist.
“Holmes?” A raise of his eyebrows was all he received as he pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders, suddenly cold. “You were older then that when we met. Did you live with others before me?”
“No.” The same quark of a smile haunted his lips like a ghost. “You were, and are the only one. I found that finding a person to share my rooms with me would be infinitely more difficult than finding them.”
“ Mycroft would have been happy to give me the rent and allow me to live alone indefinitely , money was no longer an object for him, his position afforded him his wants and I was his only indulgence. This situation would have been unbearable to me, I already owed him my continued existence. We came to a compromise, he would pay the other half of the rent until such a time that I found the person with which to share them. This arrangement left me feeling like less of an invalid and still gave him some rein of control over my life when our relationship was still so new that he feared that out of pride I would choose the first person available and thus release him from his binds.
Between Mycroft’s circle of colleagues and acquaintances and my own from lab and university there was an unending parade of potential borders. Men watching my brothers political rise accosted me in hopes of getting to him, people having difficulty with experiments approached me in the hopes that I could assist them and others came simply for want of a place to stay. Each man I gave an extensive interview, watching as their stories deviated from my own deductions. I read faces as false as my own. I listened to the meek and the confident alike and in each of them I read something that I could not tolerate. Their faults were rarely as bad as my own but I could not fathom living with them, sharing my life with their unworthy minds.
I began to understand why Mycroft lived alone, why he dealt with men during the day and shared his life with no one, his adventures unspoken of, untold. As the months passed and the hopefuls melted away into shadow I forgot my original attempts at an almost normal life. I threw myself into my work, my cases were growing by the month, becoming more interesting, more challenging, my life was forming under my hands in the precise way I wanted. My chemical experiments were consuming me. I had passed on no less than three cases that year that could have been solved if a splotch or stain could have been identified as blood and I knew I was getting close to an answer. I had already refabricated my notes from Italy, it was coming to the point that I was in need of blood more than time. I remember how my left arm was covered in plasters with all the pricks I had taken from it, I imagined that to the unobservant eye the little bandages hid the fading scars from once shattered arm.
And now the two characters meet, the little boy grown and becomes the man you know, a past and a present rectified. Yes, I can see the recognition on your face and the way I was correct, you never thought twice about all of those bandages for such little wounds.
I have come at last to the conclusion of my sordid history. The day my experiments with hemoglobin at last came to fruition. The day that I met you.
I had taken several classes with Stanford in the past, he was never the most brilliant of students, always remaining firmly in middle of the pack but he was dim enough to be amiable to almost anyone he ever met. I never took particular care to hide my peculiarities at this point in time; I can still recall with perfect clarity some of the spectacular faces I inspired in him with my more erroneous outbursts. When he walked in the door that day only moments after I had verified my success with the obvious intent of speaking to me I could not rein in my excitement.
Of course I saw you standing there, thin as a waif and brown as a nut as you would put it later, but I was consumed with my work, with testing my compound one final time. I made as series of observations and deductions about you so quickly in my subconscious that I was not even aware of the steps I was taking, it was as if you had walked in and handed me a synopsis of your recent past and yet I had not let you say a single word.
When again the test worked, when I held in my hands my success and the guarantee that I could be financially independent from Mycroft I saw you for what was truly the first time. Stanford had one of those looks upon his face, as if I had stepped off the edge of the world and I had reemerged with all of the demons of hell on my heels and you stood there next to him and yet a world apart. Where in him I had inspired near horror and bewilderment in you there was unbridled, pure, amusement. You were repressing the laughter shining in your eyes and yet there was something intelligent lingering beneath it, an appreciation of the work I had done, an appreciation of me.
All of my deductive reasoning failed me. All the classes I had taken, the years of studying people and striving to understand them and I had no idea why I wanted you to stay just like that, joy filling your wounded body, with me, forever.
You were the first irrational decision I made in my entire life.
When you said you were looking for rooms I did not want to interrogate you as I did the others, I did not need to know a single thing more. You had a reality and kindness about you that none of the others had had, it was as if they were marching blindly through life as you were just stumbling into it.
I did not want to give you the chance to slip away.
I went to Mycroft that night, as soon as you left me, and told him everything. I always believed that when I found a flat mate my brother would insist on meeting them, to observe for himself how we interacted together, to assure himself in his protective manner that I was not at last giving up on the life I had chosen. I should have known from that moment that something astounding was happening, because he did not insist, he saw something in the way I spoke about you even then.
You must promise to forgive me my little lies I felt so necessary at the beginning. By that point Mrs. Hudson had grown fond of me despite of myself and when I requested that she show us the rooms together as if I had only just visited her for the first time recently she agreed. I did not want you to know the peculiar circumstances under which I was staying in the rooms, no need to make all the wrong questions arise between us. It was her idea to move my few personal things downstairs for the time being and say that the few pieces I had brought with me were part of the suite. She always has enjoyed her little parts in my strange adventures, moving here has ruined me for any other place.
Do you remember that first ride we shared together to Baker Street, our knees knocking together like little boys? The little speech of faults I had prepared for you just to see you laugh, to see the strange reactions you had to my insanity? The way I nearly lost myself into the way I did not have to rein myself in around you.
I cannot remember a day in my life before that in which I laughed so much.
You may not believe it but before that day with Stanford in the lab I had rarely felt the need to explain any of my successes to my peers. Of course I would feel the first thrill of brilliance, the yearning to share, to have an audience. I would be enveloped in the sound of a sonata I had completed, the delicate traces of clues through a tangled and convoluted web, the relations of two chemicals and the resounding implications. And I would get no further than a few words, a sentence or two and their faces would drop and their eyes would look into nothing and I knew it did not matter what I said, that my joy was only my own. Something to be locked away somewhere safe and private because no one else could hope to appreciate it the way I did.
And then you came to me.
You watched me with wide eyes as we wandered these empty rooms and the boxes of your things appeared on the stairs. You listened to my stories and explanations, no matter what the topic you never shied away from it, never coming up with the reaction I would have expected. You have always had the inexplicable ability to ask the perfect question, to wonder about the one thing I would not have considered. You inspired genius in me.
In those first few weeks where you never asked the questions burning on your tongue I reveled in your examination of me. Every moment you evaluated me I was learning to be the man you now know. I was learning how to live with someone who brought out the best in me.
I know that you view those early days with a contempt for your own physical weakness, the way your shattered nerves had you on edge, made you cry out in your sleep, but it meant more to me then you could ever understand. All it took was the touch of my hand on your shoulder and I could draw a smile from you as if for an instant I was something divine. When I learned to link my arm through yours without a word, when I could see you begin to tremble, you looked on me as a friend. Although we never spoke of our pasts, when we were together like that it felt as if it did not matter.
I thought of telling you, when you began to notice those inescapable details. How despite the flood of clients no friends ever called on me. How while the rest of our peers were pairing off at an alarming rate we remained closeted in our rooms with Mrs. Hudson being the only lady I allowed into our lives. Perhaps even the way I could spend hours on the settee in the living room and no shadow of hair would ever mar my cheeks. But by then we had become partners.
You looked at me the way no one ever had, with a respect and wonder I had never dreamed possible in the course of my life. You were singular to me, the one person I had ever known that saw me for what I was instead of the castrati that I had been made. To you I was the detective and the chemist, I was the eccentric genius with mad experiments and somehow none of that was repellent. To you I was the friend with whom you had grand adventures like the storybooks you read. You saw the man you had grown to know, the person I had become.
You had become my only friend. My most intimate companion.
I could not chance destroying that for something as insignificant as my past, no matter how much you wished I would.
That all changed of course.
You could never walk away from an injury, physical or otherwise once you knew of its existence. I had to hide my mutilations from you when you treated my leg and I could see you take on the pain you perceived in me in my actions. I watched as the only true friendship in my life, the most pivotal decision I had ever made, became infected with pity and wondering. I watched you plan your ill conceived plans, I let you conduct your experiments on me and I did not have the heart to derail you.
To be honest, I did not think it would break me so easily. I underestimated the power you have over me which I am powerless to combat.
I did not think that after my life so gentle a touch as yours would be the one to break me.”
Throughout the tale Holmes had been as impartial as if it was a story he had once read, a plotline of morbid creation, something factual and unemotional as the weather. The emphasis lay in the right places, the inflection rang true, but it was told with empathy, not personal emotion. As if he could really tell the whole thing and emerge the same man.
But now that it was over his long limbs seemed to fold tighter together, knees held tight against his chest, the blanket falling open and revealing a sliver of porcelain skin, his dark meticulous hair falling into his face haphazardly. As if he was shrinking in on himself, pulling himself in, trying to disappear into his great mind and forgetting that he left the physical world behind. Grey eyes which had always shone with life and brilliance were becoming distant and hazed as a drug coma.
Now that the last strains of the story had finally been told there was nothing left of him, as if the story had pulled its life from him, brutalizing him with every stolen and coerced word.
Watson recognized the look. The way he held himself was something dangerously close to his own heart.
Like trying to explain how it felt to watch bullets destroy youthful flesh in the battlefield, to explain the sensation of molten lead impacting with his body and shattering bone in the safety of the hospital and then trying to pretend as if your very essence had not been exposed and splayed for examination. Like every fiber of your being was pulling in a thousand different directions and you are teetering on the edge of explosion and oblivion and the only way to escape it is to give up utterly.
“Holmes.” Grey eyes flicked to him for but a moment and then away again as if they could not bear the sight of him, could not look into eyes now created to be his perfect judge. Watson ignored the dull throb in his leg. The wet material clung to the scar tissue of his thigh, tacky against his skin as he leaned forward, his hand stretching out as if to touch and then retracting. The blanket covering his own shoulders slipped lower, scratching against the ragged edges of white nerveless tissue like a spider web of shattered glass. “What is it that you think will happen now that I know?”
Something, some indefinable dark emotion flickered across his friends face so quickly he almost missed it, a self-deprecating smirk, a pained grimace, profound sadness. Incommunicable pain rearing its head before being swallowed down, hidden away to where his secrets once lingered but now the scar tissue had been ripped afresh and copied into foreign minds.
“You say ‘think’ as if I have nothing more than a guess.” Long fingers danced an erratic pattern, what would be random with any other to him would be a lost sonata or the Morse code of a message only he could understand, lost against the black of his pants and the fickle trick of time. His arms were pulled taught, wiry muscles straining silently as if he held himself together by force, actions normally hidden by long sleeves and layers of clothing captivating the eye. “As if reason and logic do not create the deductions and possible futures coursing through my mind.” He took a deep breath, filling his slender chest, his eyes sinking closed as he deflated with the exhalation. His voice became that well known rise and fall of the explanation of a worthy case, the threads of clues coming together to form a final obvious truth.
“I cannot, of course, tell you the imminent future but I can give you a breakdown of what will is most likely to transpire between us. The future that I failed to prevent despite myself.” The rhythm of his unheard song changed, the pattern of his fingers slowing, each motion and curve of a knuckle seeming to span entire heartbeats. Moonlight Sonata.
“At first you will act as if nothing has changed and for awhile it will even feel as if this is true, you will look at the future I predict now and you will smile to yourself and think of how melodramatic and pessimistic I was. This period will span days, time I assure you I will not waste. We will have breakfast together every day, we will attend the theater, dinner, perhaps a case will come our way and we will go out together as we have for so many years. Then, one day you will wake, the shock will have worn off and all of the details which once meant nothing will impress themselves upon you.
You will touch my hand and my skin will seem too soft, when I speak you will hear the soft inevitable tinge of youthfulness and height that you had never perceived before you knew to look. You will change the way you are with me. You will not mean to, I would never accuse you of that, never imagine you so cruel. But where you once saw infallibility you will see flaws. You will interpret my actions through the new lens through which you will view me. My word will become less omnipotent, you will question our adventures, imagine reasons for the way I treat clients. You will give reasons for my actions in a way that before where too shrouded in mystery to interpret.
It may take the passage of weeks, months or even years but you will progressively distance yourself from me. Your stories in the Strand will taper off, you will take on more clients as a doctor and more and more often my requests for your company will be, regretfully, denied.
Others will start to remind you of me. The ragged youth on the corner calling out in a sweet high voice the newest headline. The couple holding hands in your office, one hand on a swollen belly and the evidence of the next generation, the things I am incapable of having but still exist for you.
You will find a girl. You will insist it is love, or at the very least that she is a good woman. You will get engaged and all of your spare time will be spent courting her.
You will reassure me that you will visit, that it will be as if nothing has changed at all.
By the time you officially move out of Baker Street you will barely notice my absence.
I will become the friend that you invite to Sunday dinner, the one that lingers after dinner for another drink and a single cigarette without the presence of your wife just to pretend that we still know each other. To pretend that the silences in which we stand do not hold more meaning now than the words we share.
I will be the name brought up on a distant Sunday by your smiling wife as she tells you to invite me to dinner. You will have every intention of doing so, before a patient calls on you. And another. And another. Until the day is gone and I am nothing but a lingering feeling of forgetfulness haunting the back of your mind.
Years will pass. You will read my name in the papers and maybe this night will have faded from your memory entirely. You will remember our days together as fondly as a dream. You will remember us as we are in the stories you captured us in.
We will age, our bodies will deteriorate and those around us will suffer similar fates. Some will die young, some will move away and others will grow up. Perhaps you will be on wife number two when we find our paths come together again.
You will be rushing off on an errand, off your usual path but well within the monotony of your accustomed life when you see me. At first you will not know me, an almost familiar face in the haze of decades. And then you will see me through the years.
You might nod at me and contemplate moving past me but you will condemn the thought a moment later. Your smile when our hands grasp tight will be genuine and fond. You will say how sorry you are that you have to run and you will propose drinks together soon. In that moment you will mean every word.
Alone in the darkness of you room that night, your wife off put by your dour mood, you will hold a note written to me- and you will crumple it and put it in the bin with all of the half written notes inscribed with my name and you will think to yourself that it was silly to imagine that you could go back. Even for a drink. Even for just a stolen moment.
I will understand when I do not hear from you. I will not blame you but neither will I write you.
If we see each other again as we age we will smile, share a word, and disappear.”
A/N: We are almost at the end of this unintentional bohemouth. I know how much this sounds like an ending but hold on, the best is definetly yet to come.