Fic: A Good Man Pt 1
Title: A Good Man
Rating: PG 13 ish
Pairing/s: John/Sherlock with a hint at some Mystrade
Warnings: Violence and mentions of drug use.
Summary: Sherlock finally has that breakdown everyone has been expecting.
Notes: Written as part of the sherlockmas gift exchange for blamography.
The title is taken from a quote of Lestrade’s in A Study in Pink. The story itself is, in some ways, an incredibly liberal rewrite of A.C.D’s The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, because I figured there are few things better to precipitate a breakdown than hallucinogenic poisons. I meant for this to be about 2 thousand words…it got away from me…miles away. Hope it’s not too tedious to read.
Part Two
A Good Man
“…Sherlock Holmes is a great man. And I think one day, if we’re very, very lucky, he might even be a good one.”
from the personal blog of John H. Watson
March 29th, 2013. Last saved: 12:02 A.M.
That shite therapist of mine was always firm in the belief that writing would help me organize my thoughts and reestablish myself as a citizen in my own mind, to put to rest the solider. To her credit, she was wrong about everything else, and I feel no less a solider than I ever did, (although it may be my friendship with Sherlock that is to blame for that; “When you walk with Sherlock Holmes you see the battlefield,” said Mycroft) but my writing does, at the very least, help me to sort through events.
I do not usually have any trouble with the order of events as they happened. I have a very good memory for detail, even if all my observations appear clumsy beside my friend’s. But somehow, this time, my process is failing me. I cannot recall the beginning. Every time I think back I find my memory begins with the breaking point, with the downward turn of events, the catastrophe. Every time, I think of Sherlock’s long fingers gripping tight in my hair. I think of the back of the pen knife tracing up my trachea, his voice like black silk in my ear.
“Bored with you, actually.”
It begins with my moment of disbelief. With fifteen seconds of doubt. Sherlock Holmes is not a machine. Or a sociopath. He’s a man. Extraordinary and brilliant, sometimes cold, but completely human. Probably more so than most people. I’m sure that he wants nothing more than to be exactly what he pretends to be. The belief of other people in those lies is the closest he can get. My memory begins in the fifteen seconds I thought I believed the lie.
He made a mistake that broke the moment. He pulled my head back to bare my throat for the blade. I’d been shaking and dizzy, loose with adrenaline and the subconscious preparation to defend myself. I almost laughed in relief when I felt my head yanked back and the cold bite on my skin.
He was cracking apart. I had to get him home. He certainly wasn’t about to come quietly.
I punched him the jaw, and he dropped to the mud, unconscious.
He’ll do things he’ll think you would find unforgivable.
Everything is out of order. I’m exhausted. I would sleep and write this later but it itches like a new scab. I need to scratch it. I need to find the catalyst.
Sherlock was poised before the fire in the cottage, watching me with feverish eyes. The envelope was in his hands. The firelight cast itself orange on his twitching fingers. “I’ll understand if you would rather not partake in this experiment.” I was hurling the door open, the sweet smell of the countryside after a rain no comfort to me. Things were in a cascade by then, unstoppable.
“Sherlock, you promised me you wouldn’t die today,” I said desperately.
“No. I promised you I wouldn’t die yesterday. However, I have no intention of dying today either. It’s unlikely that this will be fatal.” Sherlock tossed the envelope into the fire.
The paper curled away and spit up wretched yellow smoke. The acrid smell of the poison hit me like a fist. It took hold of Sherlock like a claw. As my own vision began to swim away I saw him shouting wordlessly, pushing himself away from an imaginary terror, twisting and retching on the carpet. The smoke curled up in seductive tendrils, lapping at the ceiling. I was sinking into red sand. We were almost both lost to the hallucinations. Sherlock wailed.
The sound sank teeth into my chest and brought me a moment of sanity. Sherlock was under the window tearing at his own face. I launched myself across the room and grabbed him around to waist to haul us both out the door into the clearing afternoon. We lay on the grass, gasping while the clouds broke above us. Beautiful baby blue behind the gray and white. My mind cleared slowly to the world. Sherlock’s wrist was clenched in my hand.
He had stopped screaming but I could see the tracks on his face and hear the rasp in his breathing. I rolled onto my knees and knelt over him. He looked up at me in fading horror. “John?’ he choked. His hand reached up like it was going to anchor on me.
He stopped it short, and then shoved me away. We were covered in mud.
“That was an unbelievably stupid thing to do,” I snarled, angry and hurt.
“No. It was a risky thing to do, and perfectly within my psychological profile. You are the stupid one for rooming with a psychopath and expecting him to magically turn into a normal human being.”
I put myself on my feet.
“So we’re a psychopath now? Bored with being a sociopath?” I had my back to him. I didn’t hear him move, there was a rushing in my ears. Then he had me, hand tangled in my hair, knife at my throat.
“Bored with you, actually.”
No. I didn’t go back far enough.
A man knocked us out of our beds at eleven o’clock in the morning. An aging vicar, white faced, wringing his hat to an early death. He had a friend who followed, a wreck of a man, begging for our help, insisting that the devil was at work. His sister had been murdered in the night and his two brothers driven to madness. The maid had found them that morning sitting around a card table with their faces twisted into grotesque expressions. Mortimer Tregennis, that was the man’s name.
Sherlock could hardly pass up the opportunity to outsmart the devil. He inspected the crime scene, four miles off at the manor of Tredannick Wartha, and walked back to the cottage without offering a word of consolation to the traumatized Mr. Tregennis. I followed, but I must have been walking too close, or staring too much because he suddenly snapped:
“Do stop looking at me like I’m crumbling china, John! I’m not dying today, but when I do I’ll be sure to die alone to spare your sensitive disposition!”
We had a late afternoon visitor, the same day, Dr. Leon Sterndale, an amateur collector of African poisons, who claimed a connection to the Tregennis family and inquired about the direction of our investigations. Sherlock was short and rude, and no more forthcoming than he had been that morning. Dr. Sterndale left us in a huff. Sherlock was dark and uncommunicative the rest of the evening.
The next day the vicar returned to tell us that Mortimer Tregennis was dead. Killed in the same manner as his sister, found by the vicar himself in the very chair where his brother, George, had gone mad. We returned to Tregennis Wartha and found that the body had not yet been moved. Sherlock was delighted, but shaking from head to food under the stress of his own nervous energy. He put a great deal of importance on the antique lamp that sat on the card table. He borrowed a pen knife from the vicar and he scraped some white residue into an envelope from the talc shield on the top of the lamp.
When we returned to the cottage Sherlock built up a fire in the hearth and I found myself gripped with apprehension.
He stepped back a small distance and stood poised before the fire, watching me with feverish eyes.
Again! I’m all mixed up! The very beginning! I must go back all the way to Dr. Agar.
Dr. Moore Agar, a specialist in unique mental afflictions and anxieties, asked me pointedly to join him for brunch eight days ago. He had something to tell me, I knew. He was a nice enough chap, but like many of my readers and Sherlock’s clients, he was interested in me only as far as I was connected with Sherlock. Dr. John Watson, blogger, soldier, secondary extension of Sherlock Holmes. I wasn’t insulted.
He told me…Damn!
Perhaps a few prefacing remarks are in order. This past spring had been extraordinarily busy. We were bombarded by case after case, and Sherlock, with his usual disregard for his own health, neglected utterly to allow himself a rest. For two months he worked almost nonstop. I haven’t even had the time write up the proper stories.
I doubt I could remember them now. They blur together like overlapping pieces of mismatched stained glass.
It was during one of those cases that we met Dr. Agar. He stayed in touch with me afterwards and, for both professional and personal reasons, kept up with my blog.
“Convince Sherlock to go with you on holiday,” he told me when we had finished eating. “He’s heading for a breakdown if he doesn’t take some rest. And with his disposition and…personality, it won’t be a pretty thing.”
“You can recognize the symptoms through the blog?”
“You’re a very descriptive and accurate writer. A few weeks should be fine, and probably the longest he could stand to be idle. But it’s absolutely necessary to his health.” Dr. Agar made his career out of knowing the intimate functions of extraordinary minds, I was in no position to argue. And even a plebian such as myself could see how right he was. I agreed and thanked him.
“If Sherlock does break down,” he added at the last moment, “he won’t be easy about it. And he won’t want your help. It’s likely he’ll do anything he can to prevent you from helping. He’ll push you away, he’ll be cruel, he’ll do things he thinks you would find unforgivable. He’ll want ruin before he wants your help.” Dr. Agar’s held my eyes intently. “But he’ll need your help, John. Don’t abandon him, if you can help it. Even if you can’t forgive him, don’t leave him.”
His warning left me cold.
I convinced Sherlock to go with me on holiday. It took six hours of intermittent pleading and arguments. He finally admitted he was subject to the whims of his body and if it failed he could hardly help but fail as well. We ended up on the Cornish peninsula near Poldhu Bay through the productive prying of Mycroft Holmes. He rented us a small lonely cottage we could never have afforded on our own, even with Sherlock’s occasional windfalls from grateful and wealthy clients. We spent one peaceful night before an aging vicar knocked us up the next morning.
Mortimer Tregennis died the next day and Sherlock found the poison on the old gas lamp. He paused to look at me before throwing it on the fire. The pen knife he put to my throat was the one he’d stolen from the vicar. I punched him because I didn’t know how else to get him home.
Mycroft got us home. He sent a cab, arranged for a private car on the train, and had a driver meet us at the London station. I had my medical bag with me, a new syringe hidden in the lining in anticipation of the worst, and a bottle of Ketamine that I still carried out of habit. It served to keep Sherlock asleep until I could lay him on our own sofa at Baker Street. The man Mycroft sent helped carry him up the stairs. He left without a blink or a question.
I waited, shaking in my armchair, for the drug to wear off. I had to chase Mrs. Hudson downstairs with orders not to disturb us. The skull watched me stand in the middle of our living room, trapped in the indecision of whether or not to make tea.
Ah. There. I’ve got it all in order now, I think. Dr Agar. Poldhu Bay. Mortimer Tregennis and the poison. The knife. Sherlock, drugged and pale on the sofa.
We spend our lives telling stories to other people, it doesn’t seem right that it’s so difficult to tell the ones that matter. There is something stubborn in stories that come from the heart. The mind jumbles them all up. They aren’t linear, the important stories. Unless they’re lies. I think it must be kinder to lie. Kinder to the author, if no one else.
Sherlock was groggy when he stirred. The look he gave me was hateful. I waited for him to speak, wondering how one explained away beating and drugging his best friend. It helped that he had tried to slit my throat. It made my excuses easier.
“It seems a logistical mistake, bringing your attempted murderer back to your living room,” he observed flatly. The bravado of it was undermined by the trembling of his jaw and stuttering of his chest.
“Our living room,” I reminded him. “And you weren’t going to kill me. You wanted to make me believe you had tried. You know more ways to kill a man than I do. I can’t believe you don’t know how to cut a throat properly. If you tip the head back the windpipe juts out and blocks a clean cut to the artery. It’s messy and ineffective, especially with a little pen knife.” He glared at me. “The bastard might even live,” I finished with meaning.
London buzzed on without us outside. The scent of Mrs. Hudson’s herbal soothers were floating up the stairway. In Poldhu Bay, a man was getting away with murder. And my flat mate had a purple swelling along his jaw.
“You’re a fool. An idiot,” he hissed.
“Yes, well. I’ve done dafter things.”
“You really haven’t,” he promised.
“I’ll get you some ice for that bruise,” I said.
Every moment I expected him to run out the door or make a second attempt to hurt me. He didn’t. He lay still on the sofa in silence. Mycroft texted me every hour on the hour. I sent the same response over and over.
He’s quiet.
And Mycroft would reply, with a regularity that did nothing for my nerves: Watch him.
I watched him like the world would end without him. I memorized every contour of his knuckles every muscle of his face. Sometimes he watched me back; glassy, unhappy. And I wondered what we looked like to the skull, our only outside observer, just sitting five feet apart staring into each other’s eyes.
I must have dozed off. Still studying the color gray. It could only have been for a few moments, the hour had been about to strike the last I remembered and Mycroft didn’t miss his check in. I jerked up when the phone buzzed.
Sherlock was still on the sofa, sitting up, watching me with calculations in his eyes. My army revolver was in his hand.
“Shall we go for a walk?” he asked.
We did. He kept the gun in his jacket and his hand in his pocket. He found a bench between the Parliament building and the Tate, along the Thames, that he liked. We sat there. He watched people go by. I waited for the next disaster.
The weather always seems to make itself convenient to Sherlock’s plans. Or perhaps he makes plans convenient to the weather. That was a clear day. A Saturday. Children and groups of teenagers ran, biked, or rollerbladed up and down the walkway.
“You are responsible for whatever I do,” said Sherlock. He had his eyes on a girl and her brother arguing over a plastic dinosaur. “That’s how you feel, isn’t it? Like you can help me recover from this breakdown you believe I am having. You believe you can forgive me for anything I’m capable of.” He turned and brought his hand to my chin in a gentle, carefully timed gesture. “You believe you love me enough,” he breathed “to always forgive me.” It would have been an ambiguous comment if he didn’t have my face in his hand.
I denied nothing. I had known he would bring it up eventually. It was the only secret he had never called me out on over our three years of living together. He used it cruelly now, brushing my cheek with his thumb, softening his gaze.
“You don’t know what I’m capable of.” The words were designed to sting. And they did. All the time I spent not brushing his shoulder, not straightening his collar, not staring when we sat watching telly together. I shrugged it off with an effort and continued as calmly as I could.
“I’m not leaving,” I said in case, on some level, it was what he needed to hear.
“What happens next is your fault,” he informed me. Then he stood up and took a few steps away from our bench. There was an older man in his early sixties leaned against lamp post. He was watching the girl and her brother play. His tan faced was relaxed and peaceful. He wore a beige sweater that was frayed at the sleeves and ripped in two places. There was a scratch on his neck. His hair was gray and brown. He wore wire frame glasses with the frame bent. He was a poor man.
Sherlock shot him in the back.
People must have screamed. That street must have been pandemonium, chaos, but I didn’t hear anything after the bang but the rationalizing in my own head. There’s a reason, I repeated over and over, moving mechanically to get us out of there. There’s a reason. I took the gun from Sherlock, who didn’t fight it. I walked us home with my hand under his arm, steering him. A police car passed us on the street. I opened the door quickly and snuck him up the stairs before Mrs. Hudson came out, asking questions.
There’s a reason.
He’ll want ruin before he wants your help.
Mycroft arrived before the police. God knows what he thought of what he saw when he walked through our door. Sherlock was lounging on the floor with his back against the sofa, humming a symphony to himself. I was making tea and pulled down a third cup when Mycroft arrived.
“Tell me who he was,” Mycroft demanded. Underneath his professionalism he was furious. He was shocked.
“An innocent man,” said Sherlock.
“I think not.” Mycroft’s voice was clipped and harsh. I thought he sounded more like a big brother than I had ever heard him.
I watched the kettle boil and fiddled with the sugar spoon. Illusions, I thought, were everywhere. Pain was an illusion, it only existed so that the body could know when and how to protect itself. In Afghanistan, during a week when the medical supplies came late, I’d seen a hypnotist convince a man who’d had his foot blown off that he was in no pain at all. The brain controlled everything; pleasure, agony, just electrical impulses. The spoon too, I noticed, could be the subject of illusion. All I had to do was hold it correctly and wiggle it enough and it appeared to bend. A trick Harry had taught me when we were kids.
So many things. Just illusions.
“You want not,” Sherlock corrected his brother. “You hope not. And you’re an idiot for both.”
“I have known you longer than you have known yourself, Sherlock. The privilege of being the older sibling.”
“Hah!”
My own pain had been an illusion. A psychosomatic limp. PTSD. Was Sherlock’s pain an illusion? I couldn’t know, he wouldn’t tell me where it hurt.
The tea was boiled, I brought Sherlock a cup. He took it from me, surprised.
“I think I’ve busted the dog,” he said to his brother. I shook my head and sat down beside him on the rug, indicating the third cup was for Mycroft, if he wanted it.
“I pray you haven’t,” whispered Mycroft, “because if you truly want to destroy yourself, the fasted way would be through him.”
“The dog has a name,” I reminded them calmly. “John Watson. He’s even got a medical degree.” I sipped my tea. It tasted wonderful. Strong, no sugar.
“Leave, Mycroft. You’ll only implicate yourself if you stay. Leave me to the police. No more worrying about troublesome Sherlock. You can focus on fixing the country. Think how nice that will be.”
“A pitiful attempt, Sherlock.”
My revolver was still in my coat, which was heavy in the warmth of our flat. I took it off and tossed it into my chair. The weight of the gun made it bounce oddly. It was one bullet lighter. A negligible mass, comparatively.
Illusions. The old man crashing to the pavement, a bullet hole in his heart. Sherlock wasn’t a bad shot. There would have been very little pain. But blood was all over his beige sweater.
Dead. That was no illusion. Death was the only real thing maybe.
All at once I could hardly breathe. I was going to fall apart. I remembered Sherlock, years ago, asking me to demonstrate what I’d learned of his methods on a pair of trainers, with pride in his face. And I remembered Sherlock, moments ago, inexplicably gunning down an old man. I couldn’t synthesize the two. I dropped my tea, it spilled everywhere and pooled hot beneath my legs in the carpet. Sherlock’s hand was cool when I grabbed it. I was burning.
He jumped as if I’d stung him when I took his hand.
“John!” he barked.
“Tell me there was a reason,” I begged. “He was a murderer or something. Please. Sherlock, tell me you didn’t kill an innocent man.” I folded his hand in mine. I spoke softly, as if he were a child. His fingernails were perfectly trimmed. “Tell me what it was.” My eyes were tearing up. I would panic soon, I was past my threshold and it would all be over if he didn’t speak.
Someone bashed open the door downstairs. I rose, mindlessly prepared to fight off the entire police force.
It was Lestrade, alone, that burst in.
“Tell me it’s not true,” he gasped when he saw me. He wasn’t wearing his badge or his coat. He was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt, the call had come to him off duty. My expression told a story he didn’t want to hear. He wiped his face with his palm, looking green. “Oh, God.”
“Inspector,” Mycroft interrupted sharply. Of all of us only Mycroft was put together. The kitchen was a mess behind him, but he was a straight line of symmetry. “I’m afraid you have to make a difficult choice very quickly.” Mycroft crossed the room and shut the door. “I will explain everything I know to you, which admittedly is not much, but we haven’t the time now.”
“Why would he shoot…in broad daylight-!”
“We don’t know.” I told him. Sherlock was silent on the floor.
“Don’t know! You don’t bloody-what on earth sort of choice do I have!”
“Sherlock or Scotland Yard,” said Mycroft. Lestrade looked desperately between the three of us. Whatever he saw in Sherlock couldn’t have been comforting; the idiot sipped his tea and didn’t say a word. I was still holding his hand, a damning piece of evidence for other reasons. Lestrade could see he was missing nearly all of the facts.
“Sherlock wouldn’t do this without a reason,” I mumbled, not very helpfully.
“Why doesn’t he explain!” Lestrade cried. Then his mobile was going off and there were sirens shrieking down the street. “Hell.”
I was amazed. Lestrade didn’t hesitate. He threw my coat at me, knocked Sherlock’s tea from his hand and all but kicked us down the stairs. “Out the back,” he ordered. “Throw out your cell, John.”
“Give him this one,” put in Mycroft. A chunky black plastic mobile was stuffed into my hand.
“Mr. Holmes will contact you. RUN!”
We ran. I pulled Sherlock along behind me and, thank the Lord for small miracles, he didn’t make it difficult. I grabbed the first taxi I saw and took us east, to the underground, the only place I could think of where no one would ask questions.
Who would go looking for the great Sherlock Holmes in a den of untouchables?
I hadn’t been there myself since that first year with Sherlock, tracking down the Golem. But it wasn’t a hard place to find. The smell was a beacon if nothing else. Trash and puddles littered the tunnels. If it had changed at all since three years ago I couldn’t tell. That could have been the same McDonalds bag, the same peppering of used fags. It was absolutely the same freezing damp. I took us into the tunnels and turned and turned until I could only just remember the way out. Sherlock had become mysteriously like a dumb child. He followed obedient and blank.
We weren’t properly equipped to stay outside. I had chucked my phone out the window of the cab, Sherlock’s too, but the mobile Mycroft had given me sat distressingly silent in my pocket. We stood together in the darkness, breathing.
At length he made one decision for me and sat down in the filth. His arms curled up to hide his face and his knees propped him against the wall.
“Sherlock,” I whispered “will you talk to me?”
He wouldn’t. But he was shivering. I sat down beside him, almost indifferent to the smell and the cold and the wet, and put my arms around him. I would keep him as warm as I could. He didn’t push me away, thankfully, he didn’t react at all. He was a stringless puppet. I pulled him against my chest and hoped he would forgive my indiscretions later, if we got through this somehow.
Even in the midst of a breakdown Sherlock was immaculate about his grooming. The scent of his shampoo was a gentle comfort in that grimy place. The back of his neck was warm. I rested my face against it and started talking to him to fill the silence, to quiet the panic in my chest. I told him everything about myself that I had never told him before. I told him everything about Afghanistan. I told him about every girl I’d ever loved and every friend I’d ever lost. I told him Harry’s story. I told him my story.
When I ran out of things to tell him about me I started to tell him about himself.
He’ll need your help, John.
“I don’t think anyone is really fooled, you know,” I said carefully. “Even Donovan, I think, knows you can’t really be a psychopath. Psychopath’s blend in to get what they want, they lie, they charm people. You hate the bother of lying. You think it’s a waste of energy, convincing people to like you.
"But…I don’t think anyone understands you either.” I breathed against his nape and ran my hand down his shoulder, in case he was listening, in case he was comforted by it. “I don’t understand you. And I’m very sorry for it. It must be something obvious. Isn’t it? You’ve got a Tell, and you’re amazed that we don’t see it. There’s one thing about you that explains everything, that proves it’s all really very simple if we would just observe.” I couldn’t tell if he was listening or not. “And we just disappoint you every day.”
I talked and held him and we waited in the dark to be saved.
Rating: PG 13 ish
Pairing/s: John/Sherlock with a hint at some Mystrade
Warnings: Violence and mentions of drug use.
Summary: Sherlock finally has that breakdown everyone has been expecting.
Notes: Written as part of the sherlockmas gift exchange for blamography.
The title is taken from a quote of Lestrade’s in A Study in Pink. The story itself is, in some ways, an incredibly liberal rewrite of A.C.D’s The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, because I figured there are few things better to precipitate a breakdown than hallucinogenic poisons. I meant for this to be about 2 thousand words…it got away from me…miles away. Hope it’s not too tedious to read.
Part Two
A Good Man
“…Sherlock Holmes is a great man. And I think one day, if we’re very, very lucky, he might even be a good one.”
from the personal blog of John H. Watson
March 29th, 2013. Last saved: 12:02 A.M.
That shite therapist of mine was always firm in the belief that writing would help me organize my thoughts and reestablish myself as a citizen in my own mind, to put to rest the solider. To her credit, she was wrong about everything else, and I feel no less a solider than I ever did, (although it may be my friendship with Sherlock that is to blame for that; “When you walk with Sherlock Holmes you see the battlefield,” said Mycroft) but my writing does, at the very least, help me to sort through events.
I do not usually have any trouble with the order of events as they happened. I have a very good memory for detail, even if all my observations appear clumsy beside my friend’s. But somehow, this time, my process is failing me. I cannot recall the beginning. Every time I think back I find my memory begins with the breaking point, with the downward turn of events, the catastrophe. Every time, I think of Sherlock’s long fingers gripping tight in my hair. I think of the back of the pen knife tracing up my trachea, his voice like black silk in my ear.
“Bored with you, actually.”
It begins with my moment of disbelief. With fifteen seconds of doubt. Sherlock Holmes is not a machine. Or a sociopath. He’s a man. Extraordinary and brilliant, sometimes cold, but completely human. Probably more so than most people. I’m sure that he wants nothing more than to be exactly what he pretends to be. The belief of other people in those lies is the closest he can get. My memory begins in the fifteen seconds I thought I believed the lie.
He made a mistake that broke the moment. He pulled my head back to bare my throat for the blade. I’d been shaking and dizzy, loose with adrenaline and the subconscious preparation to defend myself. I almost laughed in relief when I felt my head yanked back and the cold bite on my skin.
He was cracking apart. I had to get him home. He certainly wasn’t about to come quietly.
I punched him the jaw, and he dropped to the mud, unconscious.
He’ll do things he’ll think you would find unforgivable.
Everything is out of order. I’m exhausted. I would sleep and write this later but it itches like a new scab. I need to scratch it. I need to find the catalyst.
Sherlock was poised before the fire in the cottage, watching me with feverish eyes. The envelope was in his hands. The firelight cast itself orange on his twitching fingers. “I’ll understand if you would rather not partake in this experiment.” I was hurling the door open, the sweet smell of the countryside after a rain no comfort to me. Things were in a cascade by then, unstoppable.
“Sherlock, you promised me you wouldn’t die today,” I said desperately.
“No. I promised you I wouldn’t die yesterday. However, I have no intention of dying today either. It’s unlikely that this will be fatal.” Sherlock tossed the envelope into the fire.
The paper curled away and spit up wretched yellow smoke. The acrid smell of the poison hit me like a fist. It took hold of Sherlock like a claw. As my own vision began to swim away I saw him shouting wordlessly, pushing himself away from an imaginary terror, twisting and retching on the carpet. The smoke curled up in seductive tendrils, lapping at the ceiling. I was sinking into red sand. We were almost both lost to the hallucinations. Sherlock wailed.
The sound sank teeth into my chest and brought me a moment of sanity. Sherlock was under the window tearing at his own face. I launched myself across the room and grabbed him around to waist to haul us both out the door into the clearing afternoon. We lay on the grass, gasping while the clouds broke above us. Beautiful baby blue behind the gray and white. My mind cleared slowly to the world. Sherlock’s wrist was clenched in my hand.
He had stopped screaming but I could see the tracks on his face and hear the rasp in his breathing. I rolled onto my knees and knelt over him. He looked up at me in fading horror. “John?’ he choked. His hand reached up like it was going to anchor on me.
He stopped it short, and then shoved me away. We were covered in mud.
“That was an unbelievably stupid thing to do,” I snarled, angry and hurt.
“No. It was a risky thing to do, and perfectly within my psychological profile. You are the stupid one for rooming with a psychopath and expecting him to magically turn into a normal human being.”
I put myself on my feet.
“So we’re a psychopath now? Bored with being a sociopath?” I had my back to him. I didn’t hear him move, there was a rushing in my ears. Then he had me, hand tangled in my hair, knife at my throat.
“Bored with you, actually.”
No. I didn’t go back far enough.
A man knocked us out of our beds at eleven o’clock in the morning. An aging vicar, white faced, wringing his hat to an early death. He had a friend who followed, a wreck of a man, begging for our help, insisting that the devil was at work. His sister had been murdered in the night and his two brothers driven to madness. The maid had found them that morning sitting around a card table with their faces twisted into grotesque expressions. Mortimer Tregennis, that was the man’s name.
Sherlock could hardly pass up the opportunity to outsmart the devil. He inspected the crime scene, four miles off at the manor of Tredannick Wartha, and walked back to the cottage without offering a word of consolation to the traumatized Mr. Tregennis. I followed, but I must have been walking too close, or staring too much because he suddenly snapped:
“Do stop looking at me like I’m crumbling china, John! I’m not dying today, but when I do I’ll be sure to die alone to spare your sensitive disposition!”
We had a late afternoon visitor, the same day, Dr. Leon Sterndale, an amateur collector of African poisons, who claimed a connection to the Tregennis family and inquired about the direction of our investigations. Sherlock was short and rude, and no more forthcoming than he had been that morning. Dr. Sterndale left us in a huff. Sherlock was dark and uncommunicative the rest of the evening.
The next day the vicar returned to tell us that Mortimer Tregennis was dead. Killed in the same manner as his sister, found by the vicar himself in the very chair where his brother, George, had gone mad. We returned to Tregennis Wartha and found that the body had not yet been moved. Sherlock was delighted, but shaking from head to food under the stress of his own nervous energy. He put a great deal of importance on the antique lamp that sat on the card table. He borrowed a pen knife from the vicar and he scraped some white residue into an envelope from the talc shield on the top of the lamp.
When we returned to the cottage Sherlock built up a fire in the hearth and I found myself gripped with apprehension.
He stepped back a small distance and stood poised before the fire, watching me with feverish eyes.
Again! I’m all mixed up! The very beginning! I must go back all the way to Dr. Agar.
Dr. Moore Agar, a specialist in unique mental afflictions and anxieties, asked me pointedly to join him for brunch eight days ago. He had something to tell me, I knew. He was a nice enough chap, but like many of my readers and Sherlock’s clients, he was interested in me only as far as I was connected with Sherlock. Dr. John Watson, blogger, soldier, secondary extension of Sherlock Holmes. I wasn’t insulted.
He told me…Damn!
Perhaps a few prefacing remarks are in order. This past spring had been extraordinarily busy. We were bombarded by case after case, and Sherlock, with his usual disregard for his own health, neglected utterly to allow himself a rest. For two months he worked almost nonstop. I haven’t even had the time write up the proper stories.
I doubt I could remember them now. They blur together like overlapping pieces of mismatched stained glass.
It was during one of those cases that we met Dr. Agar. He stayed in touch with me afterwards and, for both professional and personal reasons, kept up with my blog.
“Convince Sherlock to go with you on holiday,” he told me when we had finished eating. “He’s heading for a breakdown if he doesn’t take some rest. And with his disposition and…personality, it won’t be a pretty thing.”
“You can recognize the symptoms through the blog?”
“You’re a very descriptive and accurate writer. A few weeks should be fine, and probably the longest he could stand to be idle. But it’s absolutely necessary to his health.” Dr. Agar made his career out of knowing the intimate functions of extraordinary minds, I was in no position to argue. And even a plebian such as myself could see how right he was. I agreed and thanked him.
“If Sherlock does break down,” he added at the last moment, “he won’t be easy about it. And he won’t want your help. It’s likely he’ll do anything he can to prevent you from helping. He’ll push you away, he’ll be cruel, he’ll do things he thinks you would find unforgivable. He’ll want ruin before he wants your help.” Dr. Agar’s held my eyes intently. “But he’ll need your help, John. Don’t abandon him, if you can help it. Even if you can’t forgive him, don’t leave him.”
His warning left me cold.
I convinced Sherlock to go with me on holiday. It took six hours of intermittent pleading and arguments. He finally admitted he was subject to the whims of his body and if it failed he could hardly help but fail as well. We ended up on the Cornish peninsula near Poldhu Bay through the productive prying of Mycroft Holmes. He rented us a small lonely cottage we could never have afforded on our own, even with Sherlock’s occasional windfalls from grateful and wealthy clients. We spent one peaceful night before an aging vicar knocked us up the next morning.
Mortimer Tregennis died the next day and Sherlock found the poison on the old gas lamp. He paused to look at me before throwing it on the fire. The pen knife he put to my throat was the one he’d stolen from the vicar. I punched him because I didn’t know how else to get him home.
Mycroft got us home. He sent a cab, arranged for a private car on the train, and had a driver meet us at the London station. I had my medical bag with me, a new syringe hidden in the lining in anticipation of the worst, and a bottle of Ketamine that I still carried out of habit. It served to keep Sherlock asleep until I could lay him on our own sofa at Baker Street. The man Mycroft sent helped carry him up the stairs. He left without a blink or a question.
I waited, shaking in my armchair, for the drug to wear off. I had to chase Mrs. Hudson downstairs with orders not to disturb us. The skull watched me stand in the middle of our living room, trapped in the indecision of whether or not to make tea.
Ah. There. I’ve got it all in order now, I think. Dr Agar. Poldhu Bay. Mortimer Tregennis and the poison. The knife. Sherlock, drugged and pale on the sofa.
We spend our lives telling stories to other people, it doesn’t seem right that it’s so difficult to tell the ones that matter. There is something stubborn in stories that come from the heart. The mind jumbles them all up. They aren’t linear, the important stories. Unless they’re lies. I think it must be kinder to lie. Kinder to the author, if no one else.
Sherlock was groggy when he stirred. The look he gave me was hateful. I waited for him to speak, wondering how one explained away beating and drugging his best friend. It helped that he had tried to slit my throat. It made my excuses easier.
“It seems a logistical mistake, bringing your attempted murderer back to your living room,” he observed flatly. The bravado of it was undermined by the trembling of his jaw and stuttering of his chest.
“Our living room,” I reminded him. “And you weren’t going to kill me. You wanted to make me believe you had tried. You know more ways to kill a man than I do. I can’t believe you don’t know how to cut a throat properly. If you tip the head back the windpipe juts out and blocks a clean cut to the artery. It’s messy and ineffective, especially with a little pen knife.” He glared at me. “The bastard might even live,” I finished with meaning.
London buzzed on without us outside. The scent of Mrs. Hudson’s herbal soothers were floating up the stairway. In Poldhu Bay, a man was getting away with murder. And my flat mate had a purple swelling along his jaw.
“You’re a fool. An idiot,” he hissed.
“Yes, well. I’ve done dafter things.”
“You really haven’t,” he promised.
“I’ll get you some ice for that bruise,” I said.
Every moment I expected him to run out the door or make a second attempt to hurt me. He didn’t. He lay still on the sofa in silence. Mycroft texted me every hour on the hour. I sent the same response over and over.
He’s quiet.
And Mycroft would reply, with a regularity that did nothing for my nerves: Watch him.
I watched him like the world would end without him. I memorized every contour of his knuckles every muscle of his face. Sometimes he watched me back; glassy, unhappy. And I wondered what we looked like to the skull, our only outside observer, just sitting five feet apart staring into each other’s eyes.
I must have dozed off. Still studying the color gray. It could only have been for a few moments, the hour had been about to strike the last I remembered and Mycroft didn’t miss his check in. I jerked up when the phone buzzed.
Sherlock was still on the sofa, sitting up, watching me with calculations in his eyes. My army revolver was in his hand.
“Shall we go for a walk?” he asked.
We did. He kept the gun in his jacket and his hand in his pocket. He found a bench between the Parliament building and the Tate, along the Thames, that he liked. We sat there. He watched people go by. I waited for the next disaster.
The weather always seems to make itself convenient to Sherlock’s plans. Or perhaps he makes plans convenient to the weather. That was a clear day. A Saturday. Children and groups of teenagers ran, biked, or rollerbladed up and down the walkway.
“You are responsible for whatever I do,” said Sherlock. He had his eyes on a girl and her brother arguing over a plastic dinosaur. “That’s how you feel, isn’t it? Like you can help me recover from this breakdown you believe I am having. You believe you can forgive me for anything I’m capable of.” He turned and brought his hand to my chin in a gentle, carefully timed gesture. “You believe you love me enough,” he breathed “to always forgive me.” It would have been an ambiguous comment if he didn’t have my face in his hand.
I denied nothing. I had known he would bring it up eventually. It was the only secret he had never called me out on over our three years of living together. He used it cruelly now, brushing my cheek with his thumb, softening his gaze.
“You don’t know what I’m capable of.” The words were designed to sting. And they did. All the time I spent not brushing his shoulder, not straightening his collar, not staring when we sat watching telly together. I shrugged it off with an effort and continued as calmly as I could.
“I’m not leaving,” I said in case, on some level, it was what he needed to hear.
“What happens next is your fault,” he informed me. Then he stood up and took a few steps away from our bench. There was an older man in his early sixties leaned against lamp post. He was watching the girl and her brother play. His tan faced was relaxed and peaceful. He wore a beige sweater that was frayed at the sleeves and ripped in two places. There was a scratch on his neck. His hair was gray and brown. He wore wire frame glasses with the frame bent. He was a poor man.
Sherlock shot him in the back.
People must have screamed. That street must have been pandemonium, chaos, but I didn’t hear anything after the bang but the rationalizing in my own head. There’s a reason, I repeated over and over, moving mechanically to get us out of there. There’s a reason. I took the gun from Sherlock, who didn’t fight it. I walked us home with my hand under his arm, steering him. A police car passed us on the street. I opened the door quickly and snuck him up the stairs before Mrs. Hudson came out, asking questions.
There’s a reason.
He’ll want ruin before he wants your help.
Mycroft arrived before the police. God knows what he thought of what he saw when he walked through our door. Sherlock was lounging on the floor with his back against the sofa, humming a symphony to himself. I was making tea and pulled down a third cup when Mycroft arrived.
“Tell me who he was,” Mycroft demanded. Underneath his professionalism he was furious. He was shocked.
“An innocent man,” said Sherlock.
“I think not.” Mycroft’s voice was clipped and harsh. I thought he sounded more like a big brother than I had ever heard him.
I watched the kettle boil and fiddled with the sugar spoon. Illusions, I thought, were everywhere. Pain was an illusion, it only existed so that the body could know when and how to protect itself. In Afghanistan, during a week when the medical supplies came late, I’d seen a hypnotist convince a man who’d had his foot blown off that he was in no pain at all. The brain controlled everything; pleasure, agony, just electrical impulses. The spoon too, I noticed, could be the subject of illusion. All I had to do was hold it correctly and wiggle it enough and it appeared to bend. A trick Harry had taught me when we were kids.
So many things. Just illusions.
“You want not,” Sherlock corrected his brother. “You hope not. And you’re an idiot for both.”
“I have known you longer than you have known yourself, Sherlock. The privilege of being the older sibling.”
“Hah!”
My own pain had been an illusion. A psychosomatic limp. PTSD. Was Sherlock’s pain an illusion? I couldn’t know, he wouldn’t tell me where it hurt.
The tea was boiled, I brought Sherlock a cup. He took it from me, surprised.
“I think I’ve busted the dog,” he said to his brother. I shook my head and sat down beside him on the rug, indicating the third cup was for Mycroft, if he wanted it.
“I pray you haven’t,” whispered Mycroft, “because if you truly want to destroy yourself, the fasted way would be through him.”
“The dog has a name,” I reminded them calmly. “John Watson. He’s even got a medical degree.” I sipped my tea. It tasted wonderful. Strong, no sugar.
“Leave, Mycroft. You’ll only implicate yourself if you stay. Leave me to the police. No more worrying about troublesome Sherlock. You can focus on fixing the country. Think how nice that will be.”
“A pitiful attempt, Sherlock.”
My revolver was still in my coat, which was heavy in the warmth of our flat. I took it off and tossed it into my chair. The weight of the gun made it bounce oddly. It was one bullet lighter. A negligible mass, comparatively.
Illusions. The old man crashing to the pavement, a bullet hole in his heart. Sherlock wasn’t a bad shot. There would have been very little pain. But blood was all over his beige sweater.
Dead. That was no illusion. Death was the only real thing maybe.
All at once I could hardly breathe. I was going to fall apart. I remembered Sherlock, years ago, asking me to demonstrate what I’d learned of his methods on a pair of trainers, with pride in his face. And I remembered Sherlock, moments ago, inexplicably gunning down an old man. I couldn’t synthesize the two. I dropped my tea, it spilled everywhere and pooled hot beneath my legs in the carpet. Sherlock’s hand was cool when I grabbed it. I was burning.
He jumped as if I’d stung him when I took his hand.
“John!” he barked.
“Tell me there was a reason,” I begged. “He was a murderer or something. Please. Sherlock, tell me you didn’t kill an innocent man.” I folded his hand in mine. I spoke softly, as if he were a child. His fingernails were perfectly trimmed. “Tell me what it was.” My eyes were tearing up. I would panic soon, I was past my threshold and it would all be over if he didn’t speak.
Someone bashed open the door downstairs. I rose, mindlessly prepared to fight off the entire police force.
It was Lestrade, alone, that burst in.
“Tell me it’s not true,” he gasped when he saw me. He wasn’t wearing his badge or his coat. He was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt, the call had come to him off duty. My expression told a story he didn’t want to hear. He wiped his face with his palm, looking green. “Oh, God.”
“Inspector,” Mycroft interrupted sharply. Of all of us only Mycroft was put together. The kitchen was a mess behind him, but he was a straight line of symmetry. “I’m afraid you have to make a difficult choice very quickly.” Mycroft crossed the room and shut the door. “I will explain everything I know to you, which admittedly is not much, but we haven’t the time now.”
“Why would he shoot…in broad daylight-!”
“We don’t know.” I told him. Sherlock was silent on the floor.
“Don’t know! You don’t bloody-what on earth sort of choice do I have!”
“Sherlock or Scotland Yard,” said Mycroft. Lestrade looked desperately between the three of us. Whatever he saw in Sherlock couldn’t have been comforting; the idiot sipped his tea and didn’t say a word. I was still holding his hand, a damning piece of evidence for other reasons. Lestrade could see he was missing nearly all of the facts.
“Sherlock wouldn’t do this without a reason,” I mumbled, not very helpfully.
“Why doesn’t he explain!” Lestrade cried. Then his mobile was going off and there were sirens shrieking down the street. “Hell.”
I was amazed. Lestrade didn’t hesitate. He threw my coat at me, knocked Sherlock’s tea from his hand and all but kicked us down the stairs. “Out the back,” he ordered. “Throw out your cell, John.”
“Give him this one,” put in Mycroft. A chunky black plastic mobile was stuffed into my hand.
“Mr. Holmes will contact you. RUN!”
We ran. I pulled Sherlock along behind me and, thank the Lord for small miracles, he didn’t make it difficult. I grabbed the first taxi I saw and took us east, to the underground, the only place I could think of where no one would ask questions.
Who would go looking for the great Sherlock Holmes in a den of untouchables?
I hadn’t been there myself since that first year with Sherlock, tracking down the Golem. But it wasn’t a hard place to find. The smell was a beacon if nothing else. Trash and puddles littered the tunnels. If it had changed at all since three years ago I couldn’t tell. That could have been the same McDonalds bag, the same peppering of used fags. It was absolutely the same freezing damp. I took us into the tunnels and turned and turned until I could only just remember the way out. Sherlock had become mysteriously like a dumb child. He followed obedient and blank.
We weren’t properly equipped to stay outside. I had chucked my phone out the window of the cab, Sherlock’s too, but the mobile Mycroft had given me sat distressingly silent in my pocket. We stood together in the darkness, breathing.
At length he made one decision for me and sat down in the filth. His arms curled up to hide his face and his knees propped him against the wall.
“Sherlock,” I whispered “will you talk to me?”
He wouldn’t. But he was shivering. I sat down beside him, almost indifferent to the smell and the cold and the wet, and put my arms around him. I would keep him as warm as I could. He didn’t push me away, thankfully, he didn’t react at all. He was a stringless puppet. I pulled him against my chest and hoped he would forgive my indiscretions later, if we got through this somehow.
Even in the midst of a breakdown Sherlock was immaculate about his grooming. The scent of his shampoo was a gentle comfort in that grimy place. The back of his neck was warm. I rested my face against it and started talking to him to fill the silence, to quiet the panic in my chest. I told him everything about myself that I had never told him before. I told him everything about Afghanistan. I told him about every girl I’d ever loved and every friend I’d ever lost. I told him Harry’s story. I told him my story.
When I ran out of things to tell him about me I started to tell him about himself.
He’ll need your help, John.
“I don’t think anyone is really fooled, you know,” I said carefully. “Even Donovan, I think, knows you can’t really be a psychopath. Psychopath’s blend in to get what they want, they lie, they charm people. You hate the bother of lying. You think it’s a waste of energy, convincing people to like you.
"But…I don’t think anyone understands you either.” I breathed against his nape and ran my hand down his shoulder, in case he was listening, in case he was comforted by it. “I don’t understand you. And I’m very sorry for it. It must be something obvious. Isn’t it? You’ve got a Tell, and you’re amazed that we don’t see it. There’s one thing about you that explains everything, that proves it’s all really very simple if we would just observe.” I couldn’t tell if he was listening or not. “And we just disappoint you every day.”
I talked and held him and we waited in the dark to be saved.