Mistakes of Our Youth

By Candle Beck

NOW

On Tuesday, Watson comes for his mail.

Holmes has it waiting for him, a tidy impersonal stack on the small table near the front door. There are fingerprints on the envelopes, but they are at least unopened. Watson tucks the mail inside his coat, and looks up the stairs, hesitating with his hand on the doorknob.

He shouldn't. He swore he wouldn't, in point of fact, and Watson is usually quite faithful to the vows he makes of himself, but perhaps this was too much to ask. It has been six days since he last saw Holmes, and that is a new record.

Heavy-legged, he climbs the stairs to their rooms, a strange airy fog filling his head as if he were thousands of feet higher than he is. The bullet wound in his shoulder, half-healed now, throbs incessantly. There is a strong sense of foreboding in Watson's chest, but he has grown adept at ignoring that.

Holmes is in the sitting room. He's smoking his pipe by the window, and he doesn't look over when Watson enters. Standing silently at the door, Watson takes a moment to study his old friend, and finds Holmes somewhat thinner and darker around the eyes, but in no way the wreck of a man he might have expected.

Watson is somewhat affronted by this, and he knows that's the wrong thing to feel.

"Good afternoon, Holmes," Watson says, soft-voiced.

"Good afternoon, Doctor," Holmes answers without a flinch. He glances at Watson, and then back to the window. "You've found your mail, I presume."

"I have, thank you."

Silence falls like a stone. Holmes smokes with mindless grace, his body bent in the chair with a spill of cold English sunlight pouring over him. Three of his fingers are still splinted, held at stiff crooked angles. Watson realises that he is staring, and pulls his gaze down to the floor.

"I. I hope you are well," Watson says to his shoes. His face is flushed, his stomach knotting. It is guilt, he's sure of it. It's just the worst strain of guilt that God has ever unleashed on man.

"A kind hope, and I thank you."

Watson's spine stiffens. He wants Holmes to look at him. It's difficult to plea for forgiveness when Holmes won't even look at him.

At that thought, Watson's head wrenches to the side, shaking it off briskly because that's not what he's doing--it's not. Watson is only here to get his mail.

"I will write the post with my new address, and won't need to trouble you again," Watson hears himself saying. Things seem to echo, but that's likely just the weight of the moment.

Holmes tips his chin, affixes that regal look to his face. His eyes stay trained on the street below, but something about the set of his mouth lets Watson know that Holmes's mind is moving through far greater realities.

"Do as you must," Holmes says, fatally distracted. "Good day, Doctor Watson."

Watson's throat clicks as he swallows, staring at Holmes with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that godawful drag that does nothing but ache for his friend. His conscience issues an immediate order--leave--but Watson is able to linger a moment or two longer, eyes running over Holmes with pitiful hunger, storing away pieces of him for later lucubration. The doctor steps backwards out of the room, one hand pressed to the pad of mail in his coat, feeble protection should he be shot in the heart. In this state of mind, all kinds of catastrophe seem concretely possible.

Walking back down the stairs is a trial on the scale of peine forte et dure, all the breath crushed out of Watson's chest and his ribs splintering. He forces his mind to stay on the facts, the visible evidence. His lungs are filling, his eyes are open. His pulse is thundering in his veins because he is alive; he is surviving, no matter if it feels entirely otherwise.

Watson reminds himself violently, it is over. He reminds himself, it has to be over.

(break)

The hotel is depressing on first sight, and worse the longer he looks at it. Shutters hang crooked like blackened teeth over the windows. The floorboards whine at every step, as if below his feet there is a platoon of starving orphans crying up through the cracks.

Watson keeps his hat pulled down low over his eyes, ignoring the torporific lumps of the drunks in the gutter, and makes it up to his room, where he bolts the door against the wicked world. He tosses the mail on the table and wrangles out of his coat and shirt, at last relieved of the burden of decency. He performs a perfunctory check on the bandages wrapped around his shoulder, the bullet wound like a small grasping mouth--it's healing as well as can be expected. His mind turns down dark corners as he puts his shirt back on and pours himself a dram of cheap gin, lights a cigarette.

It's been six days since he left Baker Street. Six days alone in the faceless reaches of the city, six nights clammed up in this dreary hotel room in the Strand, watching the hooked ale-coloured moon move across the sky. Sleep has become just another absent friend alongside Holmes and sobriety and reason. Watson is acquiring quite the collection.

Holmes, and the man's aspect surfaces in Watson's mind like a white napkin in cloudy water. The imperial angle of Holmes's head, his chipped-marble wrist bent just so, rough shadow on his cheek and restless circles bruising his eyes, and Watson wishes he had never gone up those seventeen steps. He should have taken his mail and left in that same instant. He should have known it would affect him adversely; he did know. He did not care.

Watson sets his glass down on the sideboard and takes his head in his hand, rubbing hard at his temple. It has not been an easy week. Everything is discordant and wrong in the Strand, the shops not what he expects to see when he leaves the house, the sky tainted a vaguely improper shade of blue. Watson has been short of temper, snapping at flower girls on the street, swiping curs away with the brass tip of his cane catching the sunlight. He cannot work and he cannot summon enthusiasm for any but the simplest of interactions with the outside world, and he cannot stop thinking about Sherlock Holmes.

"It will pass," Watson tells himself, in the low tone that is reserved almost exclusively for prayers.

(break)

THEN

Watson came in wet from the rain, and Holmes was instantly stricken by distraction, and he thought, this must not stand.

He glared at the doctor. Watson was slapping his hat against his knee to rid it of the worst of the wet, complaining about the primordial condition of the streets. His face shone, scrubbed clean, and his hands stood out like pale scraps of lace.

"It's hardly civilised out there," Watson finished, hanging up his sodden coat and turning with military crispness.

Holmes's bad mood deepened, eyes set hard on the slick line of Watson's jaw, the jagged uneven plain of his hair once he'd run a hand absently through it. Slow-gathering heat in Holmes's stomach, and he viciously shoved it aside.

"Do you mind?" Holmes asked, letting acid burn away at the edge of his voice. "I was most profitably engaged before you came tromping in and disrupted me."

Watson rolled his eyes, and stripped out of his jacket. "One of those days, is it?"

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean." Holmes scowled at the newspaper he was holding before him, pitifully akin to a shield. He hated it when Watson acted like Holmes was the transparent one.

Wearing a smirk that made him look all of thirteen years old, Watson sat down in his usual chair, thumbing through the short stack of mail that Mrs Hudson had left on the table. Holmes watched him secretly, in feints and flickers and glances, marking the clever play of his fingers over the mail, the casual look of contentment that infected Watson whenever the two of them were both in the same room and not bleeding.

Holmes's skin tightened, and he clenched his teeth, stared sightlessly down at his newspaper. This deep wrenching feeling, this somehow overpowering weakness that required only the proximity his dearest friend--he couldn't stand it. He wouldn't.

Watson finished perusing the mail, and settled back in the chair, unfolding his legs to stretch across the carpet. Holmes bit his tongue. His head was full of curses.

"Will you join me for dinner tonight?" Watson asked him, and Holmes immediately said, "No," and then rose to his feet and left the room.

It was cold, perhaps even cruel. Watson made a cut-off sound that seemed more angry than hurt, and that was probably for the best. Holmes retreated to his bedroom, closed and locked the door behind him.

This was insufferable. It would not leave him be. Everywhere he turned these days, there was the doctor, stalwart and golden and smirking, the scent of his cigarettes lingering in the room after he'd left it. Holmes was haunted, beset with spirits. The vast recesses of his mind were crowded with ephemera, pointless trivia. Watson kept a single blue handkerchief among his white ones--a remembrance of his mother. Watson always took a sip of tea before having a sandwich. Watson's leg pained him more in the mornings, and on Sundays. Watson read the newspaper and whistled unconsciously at startling reports; the tone was a bell-clear middle C.

It was all too much. Holmes let his forehead come to rest on the wood of the door, and began to formulate a plan.

(break)

It had come upon Holmes two months ago. Two months and three days, if one was in the mood for specificity, and they had been in Whitehall, wasting breath explicating the basics of criminal investigation to Scotland Yard's finest. It was a night of absolutely no consequence at all.

Watson had been in particularly fine form, underscoring Holmes's blatant contempt with a more subtle, genial version of his own. They were both bloodied, battered in minor ways, and Watson held a handkerchief to the gash over his eyebrow, his eyes sparkling beneath the shadow of his hand. Holmes's gaze kept snagging on his friend, and it was frustrating: there was nothing to learn there, just Watson like every other night in recent history, so why should his attention be so diverted?

Every time Holmes looked at Watson, he found Watson looking back, and he wondered if perhaps the doctor knew something he didn't. It seemed exceedingly unlikely.

On the street, in the stygian gloom between the wicking gaslights, Watson's leg had given out. He sagged abruptly into Holmes, and Holmes propped him up on instinct, his hands finding sure holds on Watson's shoulder and hip.

"Ah," Watson said, and his chin brushed Holmes's cheek. "Beg pardon, dear fellow. Seem to have misjudged my limits just a tad."

Holmes made a disgruntled sound, feeling odd and out of sorts as he slung Watson's arm over his shoulders and took his weight. Watson was heavy, long-limbed and too warm, impossibly awkward. He smelled like cigarettes and blood and sweat, simple everyday smells. Holmes's head was spinning, and he ordered it to quit, distantly baffled.

He had carried Watson in that way to the brighter streets, and found them a cab. Watson slumped in the seat, his bad knee a hard knot against Holmes's own, and smiled at him, sweet and soporific.

"Thank you," Watson said. "I'll be fit again tomorrow, never fear."

"Yes, of course," was what Holmes meant to say, but his voice wasn't working. He was staring at the collapsed line of Watson's body, the bruises rising on his face, the place where their legs were pressed together. Holmes felt drunk, suddenly delirious as if he hadn't slept in days.

"All right, old boy?" Watson asked, and leaned forward, tapping at Holmes's knee.

Holmes went still and mindless for exactly two seconds, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, his throat as dry as sand. There was a feeling like a cabinet of delftware crashing in his chest, the radiating sprawl of a million shattering pieces. It had been unmistakable.

Holmes had closed his hand into a fist and told his friend with a lovely false smile, "As right as rain, my dear Watson."

But of course that had been a lie. Two months had passed, and it was still a lie. Something had happened to Holmes's vision that night, and now he could only see Watson in the lowest of ways, stripped and panting, mouth open, skin flushed. The idea was pervasive, every night and every morning when Holmes first woke up, every time he closed his eyes there was Watson, craning back and opening his blue eyes wide.

Frankly, it was horrifying. It had derailed Holmes's whole life.

But he was working towards a solution now, and that was always a copacetic place to find himself. Holmes set to it like any other case, first and foremost laying out the facts, because without facts you were no more than an animal.

As it stood: Holmes wanted to take the doctor to bed with unnerving fervour. Intricate observation led him to believe that Watson would not be entirely against such an eventuality, and further, that getting him to admit same would be the true challenge of the day. Watson had always cleaved rather closely to the ideal of a Victorian gentleman, at least in his own mind--it was a bad habit, but Holmes was fairly sure he could break him of it.

Holmes had fought this thing and that did not work. His best efforts had shattered apart like waves on the rocks; for a lesser man it would have been disheartening. Luckily, Holmes was the sort to thrive under adversity. He had come to the conclusion that the only way out was through.

Liquor, he decided at last, watching helplessly as Watson leaned in the block of sunlight falling through the window and smoked a cigarette, bare-headed with his sleeves rolled up and his hip cocked just the slightest bit. It physically hurt to look at him, but that was no matter; Holmes had always had an exceptionally high tolerance for pain.

First and foremost, Holmes thought giddily. A great deal of liquor.

(break)

Somewhat shockingly, this addle-brained plan actually worked.

There wasn't much plan to it, Holmes was forced to concede. He had brought home a bottle of Dunmill Scotch whiskey, the same moss-green label that had borne silent witness to so much of young John Watson's family life, and announced to the doctor without preamble:

"You're getting drunk tonight."

Watson lowered his newspaper, lifted an eyebrow. "Am I?"

"Naturally, naturally." Holmes was busy at the sideboard, hands flashing with glass and ice. "You would not suffer me to drink alone, I'm sure."

"I suppose I would not," Watson answered, accepting a glass from Holmes and inspecting it against the light like a found jewel. "My father's brand."

"Is it?" Holmes kept his face angled down, his tone clean of mischief. "Quelle coincidence."

Watson would be giving him a look of faint exasperation, Holmes knew. Watson would be weighing his options, sipping at the whiskey, remembering the smell of his father as he was carried to bed. Holmes watered his own drink, came to sit in the chair opposite Watson's.

"To the queen," Holmes offered, his glass at a gentlemanly angle. Watson obligingly clinked his against it, murmuring in echo, "The queen."

And so they began. The night spooled out before them, the moon on the rise as a reversed mirror for the descending level of the whiskey.

It was a delicate operation, Holmes thought several hours later, his head a shifting morass of battling thoughts. Great care must be taken, the proper foundations laid, the path swept clear. It wasn't a small subject to broach, encompassing as it did various degrees of criminality and supposed moral decay--one couldn't simply jump the gate. There was a procedure to the thing, surely. There was some alchemic formula that he could derive, the secret to creating gold.

He looked over at Watson, who appeared to have melted into the settee. The doctor's waistcoat was tugged askew, his legs strewn before him. Watson gave him a crooked inebriated smile, and a gear slipped out of place in Holmes's mind, and he heard himself asking:

"What is your opinion of sodomy, my dear man?"

Watson laughed, an abrupt bark, and then he looked closer at Holmes, and laughed a great deal more. Holmes slumped back in his chair, curling his hand over his china and scowling. There was a superfluity of reactions he might have predicted from Watson, and open mockery was rather emphatically not on the list.

"Really, Watson. Your humour is no more developed than a third form schoolboy's," Holmes said, hitting the perfect pitch of toothless scorn.

Laughter tapering off, Watson inflicted a grin on Holmes, wide untidy grin that stirred a small riot in the detective's stomach.

"You should give a fellow some warning," Watson said.

"That doesn't sound nearly as efficient."

"Yes, because heaven forbid you make absurd comments with anything but the utmost economy."

Holmes busied his hands with his pipe and a pack of shag that crumbled like old leaves between his fingers. There was a seasick feeling yawing within him, a sense of things going swiftly and irrevocably wrong. Holmes would have liked to blame it on the drunk.

"It's not absurd," he said, and made himself look at Watson because it would mean something different if he didn't.

Watson still had the traces of laughter on his face, in the easy curve of his mouth, his eyes blurry and searching. He gave Holmes a long moment of his regard, and the detective remained still for the inspection, keeping his gaze level on his friend. There was something like a cyclone happening in Holmes's chest, but his face was straight and that was enough for now.

"You are in earnest," Watson said, and it sounded like he'd meant it to be a question. Holmes allowed his head the slightest affirmative incline, and Watson's eyes narrowed, his throat ducking under a hard swallow.

"If I may refine your question somewhat," Watson said slowly, with evident care. "Are we speaking generally or specifically?"

Eyebrows hiking, mouth smirking almost against his will, Holmes propped his elbow on the chair and his chin on his hand. He tapped his finger against his cheek thoughtfully, gave Watson a briefly hooded look.

"We are speaking of whichever you'd prefer to address," Holmes told him.

"Clever boy. Makes it rather neatly my fault should the conversation go awry, eh?"

"Most things are your fault anyway."

That had been said without thought (Watson had that entirely disturbing effect on him from time to time), and immediately Holmes wished he could draw it back. Watson's face opened, surprise clearing away the clouded suspicion, and he looked very drunk for a moment.

"Are you," Watson began, and then stopped. He blinked a few times, as if trying to bring Holmes into focus. "What are you asking me?"

Holmes fidgeted, scratched a hand through his hair. He couldn't seem to catch his breath.

"I am asking for your opinion on a common sin," Holmes said, only slightly choked. He closed his hand into a fist under his chin. "I am asking you specifically."

His eyes did not move from Watson's face. They were drunk because Watson knew no artifice when he was drunk, wore no masks and told no lies, and Holmes needed him like that at this moment. The detective needed to see it.

There was shock, certainly, in the desperately high set of Watson's eyebrows, the small voiceless shapes his mouth made, and paralysing tension locking the doctor in place, his hand gripping his knee tightly enough to leech the blood from his knuckles. There was something vast and dark shifting in his eyes, a flush rising on his neck.

Holmes bit the inside of his lip, and got to his feet. He just stood there for a moment, not eyeing Watson so much as the distance between them. It was surpassingly strange, Holmes thought amid a reddening fog, that five feet of space could mean so very much.

"Would you like a warning for what I am about to do?" Holmes asked, and he did not recognise his voice.

Watson's eyes widened, an instant of blue disbelief passing through his expression. He stared up at Holmes, and mutely shook his head.

A wire tripped inside of Holmes; a string snapped; a rush of heat almost blinded him. The five feet vanished and then he had one knee up on the settee and Watson's head held in his hands, thumbs tipping his face up. Watson's lips parted, conscious thought gone from his hazy lust-black gaze, and Holmes kissed him with vicious strength, deep and then deeper still. The doctor gave beneath him so kindly, his fingers tight on Holmes's hips, his tongue in Holmes's mouth, offering reckless things.

The only way out is through, Holmes remembered briefly before Watson's hands slid up into his shirt and he rather lost his train of thought. Holmes climbed on top of his friend, ungainly in his haste, his hands clattering on Watson's shoulders. Watson said his name, said it like a moan, and wrapped his arms around Holmes, pulled him down into his waiting body.

So, yes, as Watson bit a line of kisses up Holmes's throat and thumbed open the first button on his trousers, yes, Holmes would call this particular experiment a resounding success.

(break)

NOW

Three weeks after he leaves Baker Street, Watson is almost killed in Clapham.

He's at the cards again, and he plays beyond his limits, stripped piece by piece. His cufflinks are one of the first things to go, and his cuffs poke out of his pocket, thick white curls like the plumage of some exotic bird. The last time he saw his watch, it was being dragged away on its chain across the scarred table, showing nine minutes before two in the morning like a pair of beseeching arms lifted to the sky.

For reasons that are best left unexplored, Watson cannot stop placing bets. It's all numbers, chances flitting past like moths, beautiful redemption for a hand or two and then that strappado jerk back to the fugue state of defeat. The symbols on the cards smear together and lose their meaning until they're no better than the hieroglyphs of an extinct jungle empire. Watson is leagues underwater. When the call comes to him again, he offers his shoes to the pot.

They throw him out, at that point. It is raining, because it rains every day in London now, and Watson is soaked to the bone within three minutes. There is a certain abandon in being as wet as possible, a sudden freedom to stomp in puddles. Watson is drunk, of course.

It is a mile or two back to his hotel. Cabs jangle past, cruel taunts for a man who is merely thankful to be in possession of footwear. Cabs are no use anymore, anyway, Watson thinks. Twice, he's absently given his destination as Baker Street before choking in mortification and hastily correcting himself. Even when he gets it right, he spends the whole ride wanting to bang his cane on the roof and shout up to the driver that he's going in the wrong direction entirely. No, cabs are out for the foreseeable future. It is no great hardship.

A child runs out into the street.

She is wearing a plain white shift, and seems to glow through the pluvial murk. Watson's mind swirls with the fairy stories his grandmother used to tell him, the wings hidden in the shine of pure light. He staggers forward, his bad leg buckling.

The girl is crying piteously, hunched down over her knees in the churned mud of the city street with her arms folded around her head, and Watson moves towards her, spooked and bewildered and acting on instinct.

"Are you hurt, my girl," he says, not slurring too badly, and the girl peers out at him from the acute angle of her bent arm, leaking terrified eyes the colour of weak tea. There are bruises on her thin forearms, formed in rows that tell the story of a big man's wrenching grip.

Behind them, there is a shout, a near-roar, and Watson turns to see a big man storming out into the street, apoplectic with rage. One look is enough to convict him; the small child's pealing shriek is only weight on the scale. The doctor stands, almost misplaces his balance. He puts himself in the man's path until the gauzy veil of the rain is the only thing separating them, and Watson wishes he had his revolver on him.

"Stop where you are, sir," Watson says with the air of utterly justified authority that he learned from watching the world's only consulting detective.

It doesn't work as well for him. The man does not stop so much as he continues stalking forward, and then twists his hands in Watson's sodden coat and shoves him aside. Watson slews, sticking in the ordure and muck and nearly falling. The girl is screaming, "Go away, go away," kicking like a spastic as the man reaches for her.

"Shut yer mouth, get back inside," he snarls, seizing the girl by her abused forearms and hauling her up.

"Here now," Watson shouts, and brandishes his cane like a sabre. Foolhardy heroism swans through him. "Release the child and leave off this despicable display."

One huge hand pinched around the back of the girl's neck, the man turns on Watson, showing a black-toothed sneer. His features are prognathous, bottom-heavy in a way that causes his whole face to seem to sag.

"It's a family matter, and nothing to do with you," the man says. "You'd best stand aside."

Drunk on several different things, rain spilling down his face, Watson scoffs. "I'm meant to fear retribution from a man cowardly enough to practise his fists on an undefended child? I fear that there are certain holes in your logic."

It's a challenge; it's a dare. The man takes him up on it without hesitation, plowing a fist into Watson's chin and snapping his head back. Watson comes back swinging, cracking his cane into the man's jaw and following with a few hard jabs to the ribs. It's going well for a moment, the man dazed and stumbling, the girl covering her face with both hands, crouched in her white shift like a pearl in the street.

Then the man, wholly by luck, lands a kick directly on the scar tissue mutilating Watson's bad leg, and the doctor cries out, falls to one knee. Agony wracks his body, the sick twist of nausea corrupting his stomach. The man weaves his hands together and swings like a batsman, serving Watson a devastating blow that sends him into the mud.

Then there is a boot on the back of his head, grinding his face down. Then Watson can't breathe. The rain falls like bones rattling, a curtain of darkling sound. The little girl is screaming in the background, and Watson wishes she would stop.

You are going to die like this, a small voice would like him to know. You are going to die right here in the rain, murdered by badly timed chivalry. No one is coming to save you. Your last breath with be of London mud, and when they bring your corpse to Baker Street, Holmes will know the street by the filth on your face, and perhaps someday he will come to stand quietly on this place, this place where you are going to die.

And then, blessedly, Watson loses consciousness, collapses full-scale into the black.

(break)

Hours later, he wakes up in gaol.

He's lying in a heap with several other unfortunates, the gin reek bright and silvery in his nose, his head abuzz with pain. Watson extracts himself from the drunk pile, gets shakily to his feet. The inebriates shift and resettle around his absence, snoring like a chorus of enraged bees.

The cell is cramped and almost lightless; the barred window high overhead lets in a grey haze courtesy of the milky sun. Watson recognises his surroundings, having come to pick up Holmes more than once. A memory flashes through his mind, Holmes against the wall and asleep, curled around his knees, and Watson kneeling beside him, touching his thumb to the detective's forehead and humming a reveille under his breath until Holmes came blinking awake.

Watson ruthlessly puts that aside. He limps up to the cell door (his cane has been no doubt lost forever), and shouts for a guard. The man appears, bored and horse-faced, tapping his billy club arhythmically on the iron bars.

"What's all this then?" the guard asks. "You've two hours still before you'll get any food."

Watson straightens, pulls his shoulders into a semblance of dignity. He is discoloured by the ugly foundations of the city, his clothes fit for the ashcan, but he affects a certain familiar imperiousness, making his eyes narrow and sharp.

"I would like to know the charges on which I'm being held, Constable."

"Found you drunk in the street, didn't we? Hardly a proper place for a gentleman, I'd say."

"I was not drunk," Watson protests, and that is somehow a lie and the truth at the same time. "I had been accosted, there, there--there was a little girl."

He stops, touching his head lightly. It's becoming fuzzy, the scum-tainted rain and the evil-minded man with his jaw as heavy as an anchor, his hateful piggish eyes. Watson remembers lying face down in the mud, certain that he was going to die.

"I assume I owe a bond," Watson says, changing tack.

"Aye, you do."

"If you would permit me to wire my bank-" and Watson stops. The dwindling funds in his account have been set aside to pay for another month in the hotel. This next month, Watson has decided, is when he will recover himself, return to work at St. Bart's, find someplace else to live. Recent events have seen him become dissolute and useless, it's true, but there has always been a deadline on it. He cannot post bond with that money.

A frozen hand closes around his heart, a wave of self-pity flooding through him like ichor as he considers his predicament. He feels more an orphan at this moment than he did holding the telegram that reported his father's death. He feels bereft, abandoned, quite permanently alone.

Watson swallows, wrapping his hands around the bars. The constable regards him impassively, arms crossed with the club dangling.

"Never mind," Watson says fast. "Not the bank, not--never mind that. I need to send a wire to Baker Street."

Just saying the name causes a trill in Watson's chest. The constable huffs out an irascible sigh, greatly put upon, and Watson hastens to assure, "I will of course make it worth your while."

That greases things considerably. The constable fetches a telegram pad and Watson draws a blank when asked to dictate, his mind stuttering and clogged with sand. He loses several seconds speculating on what Holmes might be doing at this moment, whether he will even come, and the constable brings him back with an impatient harrumph.

Watson rubs a hand over his face, and says, "Incarcerated in Clapham, stop. Innocent, stop. Come if you can, stop. J.W. Stop."

The constable leaves and Watson watches him go, rewriting the telegram in his mind over and over again, riddled with a nauseating doubt. He retreats to the back of the cell, crouching under the window with his hands clasped and washed in the weak coat of sunlight.

In the drunk pile there is a man afflicted with a fairly advanced case of jaundice, his snoring mouth showing teeth the colour of tar and moss, and Watson trains his mind to finding a diagnosis for him. He immerses himself in pathology and science, long words with Latinate definitions, and he doesn't calculate how long it might take for Holmes to receive and respond to the wire. Watson does what he can to avoid thinking about his friend at all, because every time he does, he grows more certain that Holmes is not coming.

(break)

It is seven hours later. Watson is sitting against a wall, knees folded in and his head on his arms. He's in a thick doze, not quite asleep, and when they call his name from the gate it becomes a part of the scene playing out behind his eyelids, and he does not stir. Subsequently, he takes a boot to the ribs, and winches his eyes open to find another aggravated constable glaring at him.

"Do you want to leave or don't you?" The constable stands, a hostile, his baton ticking against his leg with casual intimidation. Watson scrambles to his feet, holding his ribs with one hand and restlessly smoothing his hair with the other.

"The charges have been dropped?" Watson asks with an imbecilic note of hope.

The constable laughs. "Aye, and your mum's the queen. Come along, I don't have all day."

Watson follows him out of the prison with its walls that seem to be concentrated grime, and there at the sergeant's desk, leaning on his elbow and making snide comments about every copper who comes close enough, is Sherlock Holmes.

Watson doesn't understand it. He drifts up to his friend, and stands there for a moment as Holmes finishes a particularly involved bit of calumny. Watson's legs feel as heavy as soaked sand, his bones stiff and brittle. He worries that he might pitch forward onto the floor, but it's good to see Holmes again all the same.

The detective turns to him, a magisterial lift to his eyebrow. Watson gives him a little half-smile. Holmes looks tired, and manic, and older than when Watson saw him last. His eyes are nerve-wracking, faster than Watson can ever remember, flashing and riveting and sucking up information until the doctor feels depleted, slit open and drained dry.

"Holmes," Watson says, and the name feels strange in his mouth, slippery and elusive.

Holmes flinches, blinks wide and turns on his heel. He stalks out of the police station and Watson is left to hurry after him, limping heavily and hunching his shoulders like a true villain, a twisted king.

Out in the street, London hustles on with all the verve and heartlessness that several million people can muster. Holmes is standing on the kerb, his head bowed as he works to light his pipe in the stinging wind. The match flame winks, licks against his fingers. Watson comes to stand before him, shaky and dazed. Holmes glances at him and it feels like getting hit with a miniscule silver dart. Watson thinks with a vague sense of hysteria that Holmes has drawn first blood.

"You look quite well for a hardened criminal," Holmes says. The orange flame of his pipe breathes for him, his teeth showing as he exhales smoke.

"Yes," Watson responds, feeling stymied, caught on the neat curl of Holmes's hand around the bowl of the pipe, secret and encrypted like the inside of a conch shell.

"Well," Holmes said, and then nothing.

Watson stands dumbly, waiting for Holmes to finish his thought, because Holmes is not the type to fill silences with trite verbiage meant to dispel awkwardness rather that actually advance the cause of human development in any way. Watson has endured several lectures and one ink-blotted monograph on that very subject, as coincidence would have it.

But Holmes is quiet now, reduced to the ordinary doubt and clumsiness that so characterises the human condition. Watson shifts his weight, and hears himself saying with a strange lightish tone to his voice:

"I did not think that you would come."

The pipe pulls out of Holmes's mouth, smoke wreathing around his head, and he gives Watson a look that seems like surprise, but Watosn doesn't feel he can trust anything his brain has to say just now.

"I apologise if my tardiness caused you any inconvenience," Holmes tells him, and he might be talking to a particularly offensive client.

Watson wants to shake him, slap him, something equally as melodramatic. You have slept in my bed, Watson wants to say, retreat back into the solid stone of facts, the crenels and battlements that Holmes has shown him how to construct. You have put your mouth on every inch of my body, and rolled onto your stomach for me, and held me gasping and overcome. I was present at those moments and you were as well. That world existed and so did we.

"It's of no matter," Watson says instead, because he has been very well-trained.

Holmes turns and lifts his arm to hail a cab, shouting, "Ho there," and then looks back at Watson and says, "I assume you can find your own way home."

An immediate rush of negation bolts through Watson. His mind, his heart, every measurable part of him all insist, do not let him go, like every good day he'll know for the rest of his life will vanish when Holmes does.

And then Watson remembers all over again, with the fatalistic kind of detachment that has become de riguer: Holmes is not the one who left.

"I don't deserve your generosity," Watson says quickly, as Holmes puts his hand on the cab door.

The detective sends another glance his way, and this once is almost reluctant, strained and unwilling. There are scabs over Holmes's knuckles, and a faint ring of yellowish green around one eye, the back end of a week-long healing process. Watson wants to hear the story, hear how the other fellow was dismantled and disarmed.

"You may pay me back at your convenience," Holmes says.

"Of course," Watson says softly.

Holmes fidgets, and Watson thinks again how unique it is to see Holmes disconcerted, dragged down to the same petty awkward level as the rest of the world.

"Well," Holmes says again, and as he hears himself an expression of absolute baffled fury clenches his jaw, fists his hands. Holmes hates this moment, Watson understands. He would prefer to be anywhere else at any other point in his life, and that sobers Watson, saddens him in an existential kind of way.

"I do thank you, Holmes," Watson says, intending it to stand for many things. "I don't--I could think of no one else who would come. I'm sure it was your inclination to avoid any chance of encountering me-"

An abrupt snort of laughter interrupts Watson and ruins the hard set of Holmes's mouth. He gives Watson a look of impatient disbelief; Holmes can't stand it when the doctor fails to grasp the obvious.

"I believe I can safely say that it has never been my inclination to avoid encountering you," Holmes tells him. "I thought I had been especially clear on that particular point."

Watson cuts his eyes away because it's difficult to keep looking at Holmes when Holmes is looking like that. Watson touches his dirty hair self-consciously, sparing a nostalgic thought for his hat, which has been lost somewhere in the course of this long night.

"I just mean--with the prison, and the bond . . ." Watson trails off. He doesn't know what he wants to say.

Holmes's eyes sharpen on him like a lion priming its claws. They are standing three feet apart in front of the Clapham precinct of the London Metropolitan Police, and Watson bears Holmes's close inspection, fighting this sense that the two of them are all that's left of the world.

"You have not been well," Holmes reports in a voice quiet enough to feel dangerous.

Watson shrugs, and folds his hands behind his back. "Surely that can be no more than you predicted."

"For myself, certainly," Holmes says. "I was not the one who wished to interfere with the status quo. You, however, most vehemently desired our present circumstances, which I find interesting in the light of the fact that I just got you out of gaol. Tell me, my dear doctor, are events unfolding as you expected?"

There is no answer to that, of course. Watson's mouth works like dying fish, and his fingers open and close at his sides, and he doesn't say anything. Holmes smirks, a shadow lurking under his chin, and turns himself once again to the business of flagging down a cab. Watson stands watching the detective. He soaks up what he can for the long dark weeks ahead, the specific concave shape of Holmes's nose and the hopeful curve of his eyebrows, the corvine sweep of his hair. In the back of Watson's mind there is a sneaking awareness, as black and inescapable as his knowledge that someday he will die: Holmes is in love with him still. Holmes wants him and hates him and loves him; that is how this business works.

Watson starts to say, "I'm sorry," but he stops himself because he has said that enough for ten lifetimes and anyway, Holmes has told him that he would risk a blow if he uttered the words one more time.

Instead, Watson tells his detective, "I am still your friend, Holmes," and it rings hollow. Holmes scoffs without turning around.

"Thank you for your friendship, Watson," Holmes says, managing to make it sound like the most vicious of curses. Watson winces, and turns away. "Allow me to bid you good night."

A cab has pulled up next to Holmes, its ursine driver scratching meditatively at the black bristle of his beard. Holmes reaches for the door and Watson experiences another visceral burst of refusal--do not let him go--and says fast without giving it proper thought:

"I do miss you, you know."

Holmes stops his climb into the cab, and some childlike part of Watson cheers in a most unseemly manner, although mostly he is suffused with mortification. They are standing on the sidewalk. There is a police station behind them. The potential for scandal crawls across his skin; he might as well have interwoven his fingers with Holmes's, or stroked his hand over the man's hair.

Holmes is stiff as he turns, his lip carved into a sneer. Watson experiences the repellant sensation of being regarded by Sherlock Holmes as an adversary, a foe to be outthought, outmanned, and annihilated.

"Then you are either a fool or a flagellant," Holmes tells him. "You may see me whenever you wish."

"May I?" Watson asks.

The sneer on Holmes's face warps, curdles and wrenches inward. Watson shivers from the cold lucidity of it, like microscopic slivers of ice slithering under his collar.

"I have told you," Holmes says with the frustrated patience of a slow child's mother. "I am best served when you are with me. You chose to disregard that, but the fact of the matter has not changed. It's somewhat insulting that you think it would, but I'll forgive it considering how many other fatal missteps you've made recently. It simply pales in comparison, you understand."

Watson looks down, his face heating. He is very aware of the police station at his back, the felonious nature of every look Holmes gives him. Written in Holmes's gaze is the day that they spent ensconced in Watson's narrow bed, his cramped garret room where the air was hot and rare, snickering because Holmes was so slick with sweat that the doctor could not keep a grip on his hips. They laughed at how Holmes's breath whistled and wheezed through his nose when he was tending to Watson with his mouth. Once while Watson was actually inside him, pressed to Holmes's back with his knees inside his friend's, Holmes started humming an especially lurid sea shanty featuring a comely young cook's boy, and they both got to giggling so badly Watson couldn't even stay hard, and he didn't care. Holmes limp and gasping with laughter was just as good.

Every moment of that day is in detective's eyes, every time he looks at Watson. Holmes looks at him in precisely the same way. Watson has been on his own for almost a month now, and he's been experiencing it more strongly as of late.

"Perhaps I will, then," Watson says to the ordure and refuse of the gutter. "Call on you, I mean. If it would not be an imposition, of course."

Holmes just looks at him for a long moment, in the viscid fly-filled light of the tarnished streetlamps. He says, "No, Watson, it would not be an imposition. That is not what it would be."

And then he jerks his eyes away from the doctor, and with a snap in his voice he directs the driver to that well-known address, and all but scrambles into the cab. Watson barely has time to lift his hand before Holmes is rattling away, steam pouring out of the horse's bridled mouth and big muscles moving in his flanks.

At once, Watson feels deserted, a soldier left miles behind the lines. He pulls his jacket tighter and rounds his shoulders, unconsciously becoming smaller. The street shifts into dark and cold around him; the sun is going down again.

Watson resolves himself to at least make it home, and then he remembers that the word has no real meaning anymore.

(break)

THEN

Once they'd established the new world order, it took Watson all of two days before he had Holmes bent over the side of the settee.

Holmes's forehead was against the smooth leather, which was heated from his breath and felt almost like skin, at once sticky and slick. His shirt was half-open and shoved up under his arms, rough bits of cloth finding their way inside his mouth. All down the length of his bared back he could feel Watson's hands, restive and jerky with hunger, mapping the long muscles and the flex of Holmes's ribcage, dragging his thumb hard up the knobbed line of Holmes's spine.

Watson was good at this, Holmes noted, the thought gauzy and inconsequential. The doctor found a proper grip on Holmes's hip and shoulder, held him fast against the settee. He bent to mouth at the space between Holmes's shoulder blades and murmured, "Ready, old boy?"

Holmes nodded as best he could, frantic with his face squeaking on the leather. His mouth was open and panting, his hand clawing at the edge of the cushion, and his mind had distilled down to a single stream of awareness: Watson at his back, Watson easing into him and groaning, Watson sinking deeper and laying himself down on Holmes's back, surrounding him.

It was quick and hard and spectacular. Watson's body moved like it was built for this alone, each stroke impossibly deep, each one better than the last, and meanwhile his mouth was on the side of Holmes's throat, the rasp of his moustache and the heat of his tongue. Holmes began to cry out, overcome, and Watson slipped his fingers into his mouth. Holmes didn't know why it affected him so strongly, Watson's rough fingertips on his tongue, but he lost track of things after that.

Afterwards, after they had both stopped shaking, Watson levered himself up, rustling as he tidied his clothes, tucked his shirt back in. Holmes was still draped over the settee, feet on the floor and trousers around his knees, hauling in deep ragged breaths of leather. His mind felt like a carnival afire, his body raw and untrustworthy,

Watson disappeared into the lavatory for a moment and then reemerged, neatly put together, a calm look on his face. He poured two glasses of brandy and left one near Holmes's chair, took the other to his own. The doctor sat down, lit a cigarette, and said, "Not that I mind the view, but are you planning to stay like that for the rest of the afternoon?"

Holmes grunted, and rolled off the settee onto the carpet. He struggled to pull his underclothes and trousers back up, and then gave up the rest as a bad job. He sprawled on the floor, shirt wrenched around his torso and missing buttons, and gazed up at the bullet holes in the ceiling with starry eyes, trying to catch his breath. In his peripheral vision he could see Watson smiling stupidly down at his newspaper.

That was just the first time.

As it turned out, the good Doctor Watson was something of a savant when it came to the art of depravity. When he was on his knees, the world came to a stop. When he had Holmes bent double under him, every potential thought vanished like ash in a hurricane. When Watson had his hands on him, Holmes was good for nothing else.

So here was the thing that would ruin him, at long last. Here was the problem that couldn't be solved. Holmes hadn't been able to stop wanting Watson, and now he had him and it was just as the detective had feared: nothing had changed. It had only gotten worse. Holmes was still distracted, anxious and short-tempered and unreliable. Watson was still too much in his mind, the doctor's armies claiming great stretches of territory and moving ever westward. Holmes would be entirely overrun one day soon, the gleaming cities he'd so sedulously constructed reduced to rubble and ruin.

This was why he'd fought his attraction to his friend, why he had become somewhat unhinged in the effort. The plan (oh that long-ago plan) had been to allow himself one night of the doctor, just one night with both of them drunk enough to ignore it in the morning, and those life-consuming questions (what did Watson taste like, how did the skin under his clothes feel, how might he sound) would finally have answers, and Holmes would be satisfied with that, content.

It was laughable, really, desperate and naive. One time was never going to be enough. Holmes was never going to be satisfied. He was going to want all of Watson every day, forever and ever, as long as they both still drew breath. He understood that now, the vast inevitable scale of the thing, and it was faintly petrifying, but in general Holmes was adjusting.

Holmes woke up to find Watson asleep in his bed, arguing mutedly with the pillows. They spent whole evenings on the sitting room floor, drinking before the fire and scrapping like boys because they knew how it would end. Watson liked to put Holmes flat on his back and straddle his legs, use his hands alone bring him off, slowly and with profound care, eyes locked on his detective, absorbing every shudder and gasp, every time Holmes stammered out his name. Watson liked to play Holmes, draw symphonies out of him. Holmes had no control over any of it, which should have bothered him a great deal more than it did.

Sometimes when Watson looked at him, Holmes's face went red for no good reason. He took to stealing Watson's shirts just because it pleased him to see the crease of annoyance form between the doctor's fine eyebrows. Once a week or so, Holmes woke up with Watson's head between his legs, his perfect mouth already working. The sky beyond their draped windows was more blue than it had ever been. The polluted air outside tasted sweet for the first time in Holmes's long memory.

It was an altogether fascinating feeling, the detective decided. He assumed the sudden onslaught of exquisitely good sexual activity had released some kind of natural narcotic into his bloodstream, something along the lines of adrenaline. Holmes was not inexperienced in any individual act that Watson might try, but it was still a list of firsts. First time under the covers of an actual bed. First time in the daylight. First time without being drunk or chemically altered. First time with the same person for the second time. First time the act took hours. First time he couldn't speak afterwards.

So, yes, the phenomenon was new to Holmes.

But he was, in this as with all other things, an exceptionally quick study.

(break)

They took a case a short time after the evolution of their camaraderie.

It was a simple burglary, a duchess's jewels vanished, and usually Holmes didn't trouble himself for the aristocracy, but he needed funds for a new microscope, and so they set their feet for Knightsbridge. It was a standard London spring, hard blue sky and wind, treacherous devil wind stealing hats and blowing coats as wide as wings.

Watson remarked upon the loveliness of the day and Holmes vetoed the weather as a topic of conversation because they were not so intellectually stagnant just yet. Instead, they discussed the explosion of Krakatoa, and what kind of dog they would get if they were going to get a dog.

It was casual. They sized up the animals they spotted on the street, debated names and breeds. Watson had a preference for the muttiest types, the ugly bruisers and battle-scarred bulldogs rummaging in the trash behind the café. Neither of them had ever owned a pet, and in some obscure way Holmes felt that bonded them together.

"Of course, you'd treat the poor creature abysmally," Watson said. His cane clicked jauntily against the paving stones. "Never feed it, never take it out for walks."

"I am fairly certain that I could come up with more inventive abuses than those."

Watson rolled his eyes. He was smiling. "Naturally."

"Not that I would, of course. You do me a grave disservice suggesting otherwise, but I am graciously willing to overlook it."

"Ah, thank you, Holmes," Watson said. His smile tugged bigger. "I'm sure I don't deserve your tolerance."

Holmes was staring at his friend, and his shoulder slammed into a tradesman heading the opposite direction. Holmes stumbled, caught his balance, and Watson put a hand on his arm.

"Steady on, old boy," Watson said, the two of them an island in the river of passerby.

Holmes was staring at him still. Watson stood out like watercolour in a newsprint-grey world, and Holmes thought, this is one of those moments. He recognised it as it was happening, a careful kind of awe unfolding inside him.

"Let's go back home," Holmes said, and edged that direction, nudging into Watson.

"What?" the doctor laughed. "What about the duchess?"

"Sod the duchess," Holmes said cheerfully, and Watson snorted, grinned widely.

"You've already solved the case, haven't you?"

"Halfway through reading the letter, in fact." Holmes took his friend's arm, steered him through the crowd.

"So why, pray tell, did you have us walking to Knightsbridge?"

Watson was not resisting at all, going where Holmes led him, still smiling. Holmes's heart was beating very fast, as if they were in the middle of a chase, and he kept thinking how singular it was, how all-encompassing. He couldn't find the edges of this thing; it just kept going.

"Because it's a lovely day, Watson," Holmes said. "You commented on it yourself."

"I did, indeed. And yet here we are, moving speedily home."

"It'll be lovely at home too," Holmes said distractedly, thinking about how he was going to have Watson strip bare to the waist and then ask him to get on his knees.

"Holmes!" Watson said, still laughing a little bit. His eyes were lit up, deadly blue. It was almost irritating how good-looking he was. "What has come over you?"

Holmes checked the street, wound a hand in Watson's collar and pulled him close, whispering in his ear:

"I require your undivided attention. First we must find a locking door."

As close as he was, he could feel the flush rise on Watson's face, hear the small sound as the doctor swallowed hard. Holmes thrilled to see what he could do to his friend with nothing more than words. Watson shot him a look, wicked and full of promise, and told him solemnly, "I am at your service."

So they went home. Through the door, Holmes's hands adhered to Watson, under his jacket to his hips, the cotton slide of shirt against his back. They were on the stairs and kissing already, clumsy and at awkward angles but still good, still very good. Watson's mouth moved urgently against his own, one hand buried in Holmes's hair. It was graceless, exultant, the two of them on their knees at the top of the stairs, pressed together as tightly as their arms could bear.

Astounding world, Holmes thought in a fleeting moment of coherence. Watson bent him backwards, pressed him down to the carpet. Holmes felt the muscles in his back stretch, the flat heat of Watson's body against his own. An oblong patch of the sky was visible through the window on the landing, and out there birds were crying, omnibuses clattering like tin cans on a string. Out there everything persisted just as it always had, but for Sherlock Holmes doors had been flung open, curtains thrown back. Light poured through him and he could see it all so clearly now.

An hour or so later, Holmes left Watson asleep in the bed they'd finally achieved after several engrossing detours, and went into his study to compose a missive to the duchess. He sat at the desk, picking bits of lint off the sleeve of his dressing gown and gazing idly out the window. Fancy bits of palaver threaded together in his mind; the duchess would be upset that he had missed their appointment, but easily appeased by some flattery and the location of her missing jewels.

Holmes wrote half the letter, and then paused to fill and light his pipe. He blew smoke rings out the window. He felt exceedingly good, fit perfectly inside his skin. His thoughts drifted back to Watson, the bare curve of his shoulder, the uneven hitch in his breathing when Holmes had him in his mouth. The scar tissue on the doctor's leg tasted different than the unharmed skin around it. There was a thumb-sized patch on the back of his leg where hair didn't grow. Holmes wished to know everything there was to know about Watson's body. He fantasised momentarily about some horrendous explosion that would strike him deaf and blind, and he would learn to recognise Watson by touch alone.

People passed in the street below and Holmes watched them with an absently clinical eye. Men escorted women, tipped their hats to each other, tapped their canes on the stones. A slow realisation bloomed in Holmes's gut, and he looked down at the half-finished letter, smirking slightly. The case could have been solved from their sitting room; indeed, it had been. There had been no need to leave the house at all, but Holmes had walked them halfway to Knightsbridge because he had wanted to see Watson in the street, in the sunlight. He had wanted everyone else to see too. He had wanted to walk beside his friend and let all of London bear witness.

"Dangerous," Holmes muttered under his breath, but he knew he was smiling a little. Again, he searched for the edges of this thing that had lodged inside him, and again, it stretched as far as he could reach.

Watson stumbled out of Holmes's bedroom yawning and struggling to do up his shirt buttons. He squinted at Holmes, looking bemused and appealingly mussed.

"You shouldn't let me fall asleep in the middle of the day," Watson said as he collapsed into the other chair, leaning hard on his hand. "It wreaks utter havoc on my equilibrium."

"Your equilibrium looks fine from here." Holmes gave him a comical leer, and a tired smile fixed on Watson's mouth.

"What a charming devil you are," Watson said, and slumped further in the chair, letting his eyes drift shut.

Holmes watched him shamelessly. There was a loose thread trailing from Watson's shirt sleeve. There was a fresh mark on his throat, the slow-colouring shape of Holmes's mouth. Watson was unstrung, his body in a rumpled bow, his feet bare. He was half-asleep again already, his breath drawing heavy.

So, Holmes thought, and then for a long time nothing else came to him. His eyes played happily over his friend. His mind flickered and leapt, alighting nowhere for longer than an instant. Lines of poetry that he'd inadvertently memorised as a boy resurfaced, new comprehension making them shine like gold. Watson sighed, and shifted his weight, the heel of his hand sliding up his cheek. Holmes found himself holding his breath until Watson was at peace again.

It was almost disappointing, Holmes decided, although he knew disappointing was not the right word. A lifetime of uninterrupted exceptionality had led him to believe that he was immune to the prosaic emotional ailments of mankind, but that was hubris to a Promethean degree. Worse than that, it was illogical.

Now the great detective had righted himself, at long last. Now he knew that Sherlock Holmes's heart worked just like everyone else's.

(break)

NOW

Watson wakes up in Hyde Park.

He doesn't know that's where he is at first. He is dreadfully cold. He is in his stocking feet. There is an ache installed in his head like a set of metal pincers around his skull. He can barely see through the throb of it, and his stomach roils, clutches and swoons.

Watson rolls over and gets sick on the grass. His vision splinters, silver and glass, and he hurts all over. A long few minutes pass as Watson cringes and shudders, half-curled in a ball.

It's raining. Of course it is raining--it never stops. There is something terribly wrong with this world where it never stops raining.

Slowly, the doctor pulls himself together. Awareness coalesces, and when he wedges his eyes open he can see again. He pushes himself up carefully, his head hanging down. He can see his feet, thin stockings gone sheer in the rain and looking faintly bluish. They feel frozen stiff. In addition to his shoes, he's missing his hat, cane, cigarette case, and watch and chain.

You've been robbed, Watson is informed by the part of his mind that keeps track of that kind of thing. He finds a large misshapen lump on his head, tender and sore. You've been knocked unconscious. Nausea means you likely have concussion.

His head begins to spin and so he lies back down, staring up at the dawn sky coloured like dust and rust. That small voice tells him, you are a wreck, sir.

The previous night reassembles, pictures filtering and jostling into sequence. It was nothing out of the ordinary, just a drink and a game and then more drinks, more games, and that skinny youth with black hair and rapiers in his eyes, who had lured Watson into the alley and gone to his knees as the doctor had clutched the coins tight enough to leave impressions on his palm. A typical pathetic scene, and Watson lets it cloud, retreating into the jagged mess of his headache, his poor ill-used frame.

It doesn't matter what happened last night. Watson struggles to his feet and it doesn't take the first time, his legs jellying and crashing him back onto the grass. He builds up his strength, breathing deeply and looking out at the mild bend of the Serpentine. On his second attempt, he stays standing, and makes it out of the park to the street.

The day is just beginning. The rain has softened to mist, the overcast sky lowering, fresh sunlight barely seeping through. The flanks of the carriage horses gleam like silk. Watson feels wretched and chilled to the bone, his soaked clothes clinging to him. He is very aware that he isn't wearing shoes. There are only a few people on the street, all of them hidden under hats and umbrellas. The doctor cannot make out a single face.

Watson cannot walk anywhere like this, and so he flags down a cab. He has no money, and so he tells the driver to take him to Baker Street, his weariness drugging him to resignation. He already owes Holmes so much; it's like spitting in the ocean.

His key still works in the door. Hearing the tumblers turn and fall is more affecting than it should be; it's as if he's pulled Excalibur from the stone. It's been two months since he's been here. Each of the seventeen steps feels like a year taken off his life.

He finds Holmes in the sitting room, lying on the settee but not asleep, or at least, not as soon as Watson cracks the door. Holmes's eyes are watchful and black-seeming from across the room, betraying no surprise whatsoever.

Watson sways, holding on to the doorknob and shivering incessantly in his wet clothes. He asks miserably, "Might I trouble you for cab fare, my dear man?"

Holmes studies him for a long moment or two, and then moves finally, sitting up and hooking his braces back over his shoulders. His mouth curls in a cynical little smile.

"My coat is on the chair," Holmes says, tipping his chin.

Watson fetches it and empties the pockets. He goes down to pay the cab and returns shamefaced, his stockinged feet leaving long damp marks on the carpet. His heart is pounding, and he glances helplessly at the place on the landing where Holmes once moved beneath his body. This whole house is haunted.

Holmes is off the settee when Watson comes back in, over by his desk fiddling with a jerry-built gas burner that wasn't there when Watson left. Without looking up, Holmes tells him:

"Find some dry clothes, unless contracting pneumonia is one of your objectives for the night."

Dimly relieved to be given a straightforward task, Watson obediently goes into Holmes's room. In the wardrobe he finds two of his own shirts, hostages that Holmes has taken, but Watson leaves them where they are. He selects a shirt with a singed sleeve that beongs to his one-time friend, feeling sentimental and woozy. Holmes's shirts have always been just the slightest bit too small for him, each breath drawing the fabric just barely taut. The trousers are too short, and they make him feel like he's once again fifteen years old and suddenly six feet tall.

Watson hesitates a moment before returning to the sitting room. It's a bad business all around, falling back on Holmes like this. It's not good for either of them.

There's nothing for it. He's here now. He's wearing Holmes's shirt. Watson takes a deep breath, and reemerges.

Holmes is sitting in his standard chair, his pipe lit and his eyes narrow against the smoke. Watson stands awkwardly for a moment, fingering the burnt bit of sleeve and not quite looking at his friend, and then he beelines for the whiskey. It's easier to speak once he has something to occupy his hands.

"I am keeping a careful account-" Watson begins, and Holmes cuts him off with a laugh, a coarse sound like metal scraping on stone.

"I am honoured to join the ranks of your creditors," Holmes says. "Quite a sizable crowd by now, aren't we?"

Watson coughs, and takes a long steadying draught. The pain in his head batters into surf against his skull. He wishes Holmes would stop looking at him; it's possible that he's never wished for something less likely.

"Are you working?" Watson asks.

Holmes smirks at the abrupt change of subject, and answers, "Of course."

"Anything of interest?"

"No, Watson, in your absence I've developed a taste for the mundane."

A caustic smile wrenches briefly across Watson's mouth, and he rolls his eyes, fortifies himself with another drink. His mind races for something pithy to say, but nothing comes; he's lost his touch for this kind of thing. An ocean of silence stretches between them.

"I find myself in need of your advice," Holmes says a long moment later.

Watson twitches. He gives Holmes a wide-eyed look, not entirely trusting him. "With regards to what?"

"This unfortunate situation of ours." Holmes's hand moves with weary elegance, encompassing the both of them. "I pray you forgive my boldness, but I am somewhat lacking in confidants, you understand."

"Yes," Watson agrees. There is no need to think about that. Losing Holmes's companionship has felt like return of the Black Death, like half of everyone Watson knows is dead.

Holmes searches him, scrapes the pith from under Watson's skin before dragging contemplatively on his pipe.

"So, here it is," Holmes says. "The dissolution of our partnership appears to have sent you down a rather dark path. It's entirely your own fault, of course, and yet I find myself loath to leave you to the consequences."

Watson takes his drink over to his old chair and sinks down into it. The sigh of the leather taking his weight is so distinct and familiar that he flinches. Still not looking at Holmes, Watson trains his gaze on the tilted amber glow of the whiskey in the glass.

"You've seen me only at my very worst," Watson says, shaky and not up for the fight. "And only very rarely. Day to day, I assure you, I am a much different man."

Holmes gives him a scathing look. "I know all about your day to day, Watson, so please don't lie to me. It's terribly off-putting."

"I'm not-" Watson cuts himself off, blinks fast a few times. "Have you--do you have somebody spying on me?"

"Of course I have somebody spying on you," Holmes says sharply. "In fact, I have seven people spying on you--I've added you to the Irregulars' list of observation targets." He glares at Watson, daring him to object.

Watson can't answer for a long moment, stupefied and knowing he shouldn't be surprised at all. All of his recent memories suddenly have rat-faced boys scurrying through them, small dirty hands nicking into his pockets. A quick righteous flare of anger sparks to life in his stomach and he grabs hold of it frantically, prays it grows big enough to obscure everything else.

"You would violate my privacy," Watson begins to say, his voice climbing, but Holmes barks laughter and interrupts to say harshly:

"Violated worse things than that, haven't I?"

A flush springs to Watson's face, and he feels absurdly, stupidly young for just a moment, hating the bitter knowledge in Holmes's face, all that goddamn wisdom. The doctor's hand is closed perilously tight around the glass. He tries to make his eyes like stone.

"It's no longer any of your business what I do," Watson tells him.

Holmes laughs again, a jeering grin catching briefly on his lips. "My apologies, have we never met?"

"I am not one of your cases. You cannot treat me like a, a, a suspect in some crime."

"A suspect? No, my dear boy, you were tried and convicted long ago."

A pointed piece of silence falls between them at that. Watson stares at Holmes, anger and guilt at war inside of him. There is a sneer on Holmes's face, the circles under his eyes deep enough to look carved. There is something wounded about the line of Holmes's shoulders.

You did this to him, the small voice leaps to point out. Watson crushes it back down, swallowing hard. He drags his eyes off Holmes, and gazes out the window at the lightening day.

"To return to my point," Holmes says in a clipped tone. "I do not intend to let you continue this exceptionally roundabout method of suicide that you have devised."

"And what, pray tell, do you propose to do about it?"

"You're going to move back in here," Holmes tells him plainly. "And I'm going to keep your money and furnish you with an allowance."

"What?" The word shoots out of him, gusty with disbelief. Watson feels like he's been punched in the chest. "What?"

Holmes shrugs, his head held in that infuriatingly regal manner than he had. "I'm sure it seems sudden-"

"Sudden? It seems bloody ludicrous."

Holmes scowls at him. "May I finish? Thank you. Now, I'm sure it seems sudden, but once we sort out the details you'll see that I am right."

"No," Watson says, and for some reason he's terrified. "Absolutely not, Holmes, I can't move back here."

"What, because of our former regard for each other?" With a scoff and an airy wave, Holmes dismisses that. "The first attempt ended badly enough I think we both know better than to stir that pot again, eh?"

Watson just blinks at him, panicked and befuddled, the whiskey trembling in the glass. He can't quite believe that Holmes is actually serious, but surely he wouldn't joke about this. The wound is far from healed; sometimes Watson feels like it's still actively bleeding.

"It cannot be argued now," Holmes continues. "The crucial lesson to be absorbed from our history is that we are successful as friends and colleagues, and greatly less so as sexual partners. So, we'll focus our attentions on the former and leave the latter with the other misadventures of our past. No need to salt the earth, after all."

There isn't enough whiskey in the world for this conversation, really. Watson curls a hand around the lump on his head, an unconsciously defensive gesture. Holmes is sitting back, observing Watson's reaction with subtle precision. Watson is trying to keep his face still, trying not to show the malicious welter of thoughts spinning in his mind, but he doubts he's having much luck. His vocal chords feel paralysed; even if he knew what to say, it would be of no use to him.

Holmes tips his chin a fraction of an inch, and Watson reads volumes: impatience and anxiety and the beginnings of an exhausted resignation, and underlying all of it is that dull pang of longing that never leaves Holmes's eyes anymore.

"You appear less than enthused, Doctor."

Watson shakes his head, stammers, "H-how could you want me back here?"

"If you'll recall, I never wanted you to leave."

"No, Holmes, I, I," and Watson feels thick-tongued and witless, speaks without thinking, "I can't live with you. It hurts to even look at you."

"Why?" Holmes asks, too fast, shielding a stark look of offence. "What have I ever done to cause you pain?"

"It's what I've done to you," Watson cries, a frayed crack in his voice. "Seeing what I've done to you--that pains me."

Holmes's face reveals shock for a moment, wounded and outraged, and then a wall goes up, and his mouth twists in a hateful shape.

"Of course," Holmes snarls. "You gamble away every penny you have and by this time next month you'll be a full-fledged drunkard as well, but I am too pathetic a sight for you to bear."

Watson shakes his head again, his hands clenching futilely. His throat is choked off, his stomach a shrunken pit. Holmes has affected that famous slow-burning look of contempt, difficult to withstand at the best of times. Watson's mind crowds with things that he will never speak out loud.

It's that you loved me, Watson will not say to him. It's that you loved me truly and entirely, as no one else ever has, as you never believed you could, and I gave it up. I killed something in you so utterly, you'll never admit that it was ever there. When I look at you, all I see is its absence.

Watson cannot say any of that to Holmes. Instead he stands on unsteady legs and says weakly, already bracing for the blow, "I'm sorry."

The sneer on Holmes's face digs deeper. "For which incident, specifically?"

"All of them, I, I'm sorry about everything," Watson says, and then he can't stand listening to himself, seeing that hateful look on Holmes's face, and he moves swiftly for the door. "I must go."

"You're still not wearing any shoes," Holmes says, and Watson doesn't care. He goes anyway, casting one desperate look back over his shoulder to see Holmes watching him with his eyes ablaze, as furious and helpless as an unarmed man in the middle of a war.

The small voice in Watson's head sadly echoes, you loved me, and then he leaves.

(break)

THEN

A debased bounder named Cyril Willingham tried to kill Holmes on Thursday, and escaped into the bowels of the city swearing to return and finish the job, and so Friday found the detective and his doctor on board a ship to Calais.

Fleeing the country was not Holmes's first choice of actions, and yet he was somehow outvoted in their constituency of two. Watson had been possessed of enough stubbornness for ten men, his jaw set in a obstinate line and his eyes glittering.

"Paris," the doctor said through gritted teeth. "Until the villain is captured or determined to have left the city."

Indignation rich in his voice, Holmes had demanded of his friend, "Did Admiral Nelson retreat?" but Watson hadn't wavered. He had finished stitching up the long gash across Holmes's chest and told him plainly, "You may make the trip of your own free will or unconscious and shoved into a seabag--it's your decision entirely."

Holmes had scowled and grumbled and muttered imprecations against so-called loyal sons of the crown who hared off to France at the slightest provocation, but he allowed Watson to have his way. Holmes had two cracked ribs that made each breath an exhausting ordeal. It was just easier to do as Watson asked.

So they alit on the Gallic shore, and hastened to catch the train to the capital. Watson put a solicitous hand on Holmes's elbow as he mounted the iron steps, but Holmes shook him off, shot him an admonishing glare at which the doctor only rolled his eyes.

Their compartment aboard the train was small enough that their knees touched as they sat across from each other. Holmes was winded and pained and not interested in talking about it, so he immersed himself in a French newspaper, leaving Watson to his own devices.

Nothing compelling had happened since they'd left London, Holmes found. His mind softened at the edges, English and French blending indistinctly. His chest ached, an iron weight pressing his lungs as flat as foolscap. This was the worst kind of pain, tied to every breath and impossible to ignore.

Searching for any kind of distraction, Holmes let his eyes fall subtly on his friend. Watson was leaning against the window, reading a yellow-back with a garish pirate ship cleaving the wide blue on the front cover. Holmes smirked behind the newspaper, absently devising ways that he might take advantage of Watson's penchant for the sensational.

The countryside spilled past, rustic and coloured like Irish hills diluted in milk. Farmhouses sagged like clumps of dirt on the horizon. A man driving a coffle of cows took his hat off as the train went past, as if they were royalty or war dead.

Watson set aside his book and rose to take off his jacket. Holmes watched the slim line of his torso twisting as he stretched to secure the jacket in the bin overhead. A bit of Watson's shirt came untucked from his belt, and without thinking Holmes reached out to push it back into place. Watson looked down at him, a half a smile on his face.

"Thank you, Holmes."

"Can't have you looking unkempt, can we?"

"Evidently not."

"It reflects badly on both of us," Holmes told him seriously. "Who would trust the judgement of a detective who has elected to travel with such a disreputable companion?"

"I certainly wouldn't dream of it."

Their badinage was cut short as Watson checked that the lock on the door was turned and then sat back down, letting his knee rest against Holmes's rather deliberately. Holmes raised his eyebrows, and Watson gave him a secretive smile. Immediately, Holmes's mind showed him all the vastly superior things that Watson could be doing with his mouth right now.

"My dear man," Holmes murmured, and let his lips curve in a lazy smile. He watched Watson's eyes darken, still as fascinated as the first time he'd seen it.

In a move too seamlessly graceful to seem real, Watson slid off the seat onto his knees, and set his hands carefully on Holmes's legs. A breath caught in Holmes's throat and he reached out, wanting to touch Watson's rough face and then his hair, the sweet curve of the back of his neck. Watson caught his wrist, pushed his hand back down.

"You mustn't exert yourself," Watson said, culturing his voice in such a way that heat suffused Holmes's body. "You are an injured man."

"Your position does not exactly inspire calm repose," Holmes pointed out, sounding disappointingly breathless already.

"Have some self-control, Holmes," Watson said, and bent his head to press his mouth to the inside of Holmes's thigh.

The sound that came out of Holmes was new, a kind of strangled gasping cry. He twisted his hands in his own clothes to keep from reaching again, biting his lip and thinking crazy rushing things, cannonballs and rail-less trains filling his mind with thunder. It happened so quickly every time. His body had learned to respond to Watson's hands, his skin recognising him by touch alone.

Watson went to work on Holmes's belt and trousers, and as a pre-emptory effort to avoid finishing with unfortunate celerity, the detective tipped his head back and started talking.

"Hidden depths, Watson, I mean to say--dear Lord. Ah. Your, your ever-expanding limits, I just cannot--and how was I meant to know, I ask you that? No, don't stop, that was entirely rhetorical, I assure you. Here--oh, and there, and. Good, yes. Good. It's just. It's remarkable, all these things I never knew you would do. All this--oh. D-debauchery on public trains, I, I, I never imagined the day. My own dear Watson, yes, yes, sweet Christ, man, please," and then his hearing went away for awhile.

Holmes knew he was still talking because Watson reached up and pushed fingers into his mouth. Watson's fingers were rough and tasted faintly of the alcohol with which he'd cleaned Holmes's wounds. Holmes curled his tongue, sucked him in. Watson moaned around Holmes's prick and the vibration spurred through the detective's body. His hips jerked forward, and he felt Watson's nose press into his body. Holmes was breathing too hard; his chest was on fire.

Watson didn't draw out the matter, for various reasons medical and discretionary. With the utmost efficiency he took his fingers from Holmes's mouth and brought them down, a brief wet touch on the place where Holmes's leg met his body and then two fingers sliding into him, gritty and unsparing and beautiful, just beautiful. Holmes arched his back and it felt like his ribcage was collapsing, his heart crushed. He gasped from the pain, and came in a blinding rush down Watson's throat.

It took him several minutes to recover. His body felt improperly wired, unable to separate out pain from pleasure. Holmes was delirious, exalted, shivering under his skin. As his mind cleared, he became aware of Watson's head resting on his leg, and then his own hand, curled in Watson's short hair.

Holmes opened his eyes. Watson was watching him, and an idiotic little thrill went through Holmes, as familiar as his own name by now. That had been the very first symptom, that girlish glee every time Holmes had Watson's full attention. If Holmes could have had his way, Watson would never look anywhere else.

"Remarkable is not enough of a word for what you are," Holmes told him in a hoarse tone, his fingers moving lightly over Watson's hair.

A smile bent Watson's mouth, and he turned his head to press a kiss to the inside of Holmes's wrist before rising and bringing their mouths together for a real one. Holmes licked the insides of Watson's cheeks, sucked his lower lip just enough for it to swell the slightest bit.

Watson pulled back, rolled his forehead on Holmes's. "Did you strain your ribs?"

"No. Come here." Holmes lifted his lips to Watson's again, kissed him for long drifting moments, eyes blissfully shut. The train rattled around them, miles and miles of this sister country vanishing unseen behind them.

When Watson pulled away, his face was flushed and his eyes overly bright. Holmes slid his hand up Watson's leg, brushed his fingers on the leather of the doctor's belt. Watson hissed, arrested Holmes's hand with his own.

"You don't need to-" Watson began, and Holmes gave him a wicked smile.

"It's not against the law here, you know."

"Yes, I know." Watson's fingers braceleted Holmes's wrist, held him down. "You are still hurt."

"I'm fine, I told you," and Holmes was distracted, rubbing at the fine weave of Watson's trousers, leaning close and ignoring the petulant throb in his chest, the weak deflated feeling of his lungs.

"Holmes," Watson said, trying to be stern but discomposure leaked from his voice like rain through thatch. "You must--take care."

Holmes wasn't listening to him, staring down at his hand wrapped around Watson's thigh, struck by the ashen scars over his knuckles, the crinkled patch of skin where he had suffered a bad burn several months ago. It seemed inexplicable that he could forever carry the marks of a hundred minor forgotten injuries, and yet there would never be any evidence that he had once touched John Watson.

"If I asked you to put out a cigarette on my hand, would you?" Holmes asked.

Watson blinked, a vague muddled horror seeping into his gaze. "No. I--no. Why would you ask me that?"

Angling forward, tracing his fingers on the seam of Watson's trousers, Holmes kissed Watson's cheek, the steady line of his jaw. Watson tipped his head back, breathing out loudly through his nose.

"I wish to take you with me wherever I go. I wish to bear your scars," Holmes murmured against his friend's throat.

Watson gasped, and brought his hands forcefully to Holmes's head, drawing him back. Watson's eyes were lit, outraged and righteous and blue.

"I will not mutilate you," the doctor stated plainly.

Holmes laughed. "Rather too late for that, eh?"

Shock trembled across Watson's features, his mouth falling open for a moment, and he pulled away from Holmes, his hands retreating. Holmes cursed inwardly, seeing the shadow fall over his friend's face.

"Don't take on so," Holmes told him. "I was speaking metaphorically."

"Is that supposed to appease me?" Watson snapped.

"Obviously," Holmes snapped right back. His mood was blackening swiftly, the pain in his chest growing more insistent by the second. "But you appear determined to misunderstand me at every turn."

"I understand you perfectly well, old boy," Watson said, and got to his feet, reaching a hand up to steady himself on the overhead rack. He glared down at Holmes, colour high on his face, all the hardness in his expression betrayed by the soft unstable shape of his mouth.

"I've no interest in indulging your tendencies towards self-harm," Watson told him. "If that is what you were expecting of me, then perhaps it's best that we leave this thing behind us."

A flurry went through Holmes's mind, bolts of fear and anger over a bone-deep, life-swallowing foundation of refusal, thinking as if the words were branded in fire, no no, absolutely not.

He sat up too quickly, his ribs moaning, and grabbed Watson's arm, hauled him back onto the seat. Watson jounced, rapped his elbow against the window and hissed through his teeth. Holmes flattened a hand on his aching chest, and told the doctor:

"The only thing we're leaving behind us is this ridiculous argument."

Face arranged in a careful scowl, Watson shook his head tightly. "It's not ridiculous-"

"It is, quite appallingly so . Here, sit down," Holmes insisted, gripping Watson's arm as he tried to stand again.

"Refrain from manhandling me, if you please." Watson jerked out of Holmes's hold, but stayed on the seat, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring out the window at the ever-passing countryside.

"Watson," Holmes said, his voice becoming steely. "That your temper runs hot I can accept without judgement, but if you insist on abandoning reason as your blood rises, that will prove to be a daunting obstacle between us."

Watson shot him a look that felt like a claw raking through Holmes's stomach, all bottled rage and deep hurt. "Pray forgive me for introducing such inconveniences into your life."

"Will you be quiet," Holmes said sharply, not intending to sound cruel but that was how it came out. The muscle in Watson's jaw flexed, and he turned his furious gaze back to the window.

"I am trying to explain something to you," Holmes told him, tight with restraint. "This, this thing, our--our regard for each other. Emotional entanglements are well-known to fog the finer workings of the mind, but surely we can manage to stay above the fray. Logic only deserts the man who deserts it."

"Logic," Watson said, his lip curled in disgust as if speaking of a child-murderer. "The only true love of your life."

That blow landed cleanly, and took Holmes's breath away. He blinked at Watson, stunned and fatally wounded in some invisible way, and then defiance poured through him, a fanatical adolescent urge to speak the truth and the truth alone, no matter the damage it might do.

"The first, at any rate," Holmes told him, and saw light-coloured surprise dart across Watson's face, there then gone faster than a blink. Holmes looked down at the floor, his eyebrows pinching together.

There was a moment of tense silence, and then Watson said, the better part of the anger washed out of his voice, "I cannot keep my heart and mind so discrete. I do not have the faculty for it. You. You make it very difficult for me to think straight."

Holmes tamped down a smug smile, and squashed completely the mindless grin that also tried to surface. He made a small thoughtful noise instead, nudging his knee into his friend's.

"Perhaps that will lessen with time," Holmes said diplomatically.

Watson half-smiled, and shook his head. "It presaged this new regard of ours; indeed, it dates back to the day I met you. The handicap appears to be quite firmly entrenched."

"Well." Holmes rubbed his chin, stealing glances at Watson and seeing the harsh flush recede from his face. "Quite a quandary."

Watson rolled his eyes, and Holmes knew that they were past the most urgent danger. Nothing could be overly wrong with the world if Watson was rolling his eyes at him.

"Haven't you made solving quandaries your life's work?"

"I have, conveniently enough." Holmes's knee rested against Watson's in a very matey way, and he cast an approving eye over the situation. "Here's what we'll do, my boy. When you find that the tempests of emotion have obscured your better senses, you may rely on me to provide you with the perspicacity that you lack."

The doctor made a scoffing sound, and shifted so that he was leaning into Holmes. "The perspicacity to see that you are right and I am wrong in all things?"

"I would not abuse your trust in such a way," Holmes said immediately. "I would not lie to you. Not in these matters."

Watson hummed in the back of his throat, considering. Holmes stared at his profile, Watson's eyes still set on the window. It had been a month since he had first laid his hands on Watson, ten minutes since Watson had gone to his knees between Holmes's legs, almost exactly one year since they had met and taken rooms together. Already, Holmes knew that this was going to be the great story of his life, this perfectly ordinary man with his perfectly ordinary demons and the irreplaceable home they had made with each other. John Watson had overrun his defences without even trying, and now he would be in the background no matter where fate led Sherlock Holmes, no matter how many decades they had before them, together or apart.

All of that was plain; Holmes understood everything that had happened to him. It didn't mean much until Watson understood it as well.

"Why did we argue just now?" Watson asked, testing him.

"Various reasons. My carelessness of thought and speech at a moment of psychological vulnerability. Your paranoia about my well-being, especially by my own hand, which has been naturally heightened along with our regard for each other. The general stresses of the relationship that we have thus far largely ignored in favour of experimenting with new sexual positions--I speak both of the inherent legal and social risks, and the inevitable friction that will develop between two people attempting to exist wholly within the constraints of a partnership. Also, being in a different country helps."

"Does it?" Watson said, his body shaped into a loose curve against Holmes's own.

"Lowers the inhibitions," Holmes explained. "Different battlefield, different rules of engagement."

"There's an appropriate metaphor."

"Thank you, old boy." Feeling slightly invincible, Holmes tapped his fingers on Watson's knee. "It was only a skirmish, of course."

"Of course." Watson tilted his head towards Holmes, gave him a quiet smile. "We will have worse, you know."

Holmes reached up, brushed his thumb across Watson's cheek, and said, "Yes, I know."

And then they were in Paris. They stayed for three weeks, in the apartment where Holmes's grandmother had been born and lived and died. There were mice scratching in the walls, rust gathered darkly in the joints of the fixtures. In the afternoons, they walked along the Seine and talked about the Thames. At night, they spread bedding in front of the fire, wrestled like brothers on the floor. Holmes woke up with Watson's head on his stomach. He woke up stuck to his friend, the blankets wrenched around their knees. He woke up to stars falling across the piece of sky he could see through the window, flashes of light like sparked matches, and Watson's hand curled hotly around his hip.

It was springtime. Watson knew only as much French as every English schoolboy grudgingly learned, and so Holmes shepherded him through the ancient city, ordered his meals for him, called him mon cher docteur. They spent every waking moment together, and never once did the conversation flag. When Holmes received the telegram informing him that Cyril Willingham had been apprehended, he waited four days to tell his friend, and only then did they return to their own cold country.

(break)

NOW

Watson does not see Holmes for several weeks after leaving Baker Street wearing the detective's clothes and no shoes. Time stretches out like a man on the rack, days blurring together with drink and games and rain. Upon waking, his leg is as sore as if it still carries the bullet, a radiating ache that never recedes far enough to be forgotten. Watson limps through the city, hollow-eyed and approaching desperate.

With all of his waning strength, Watson attempts to keep Holmes's absurd proposal out of his mind. The trouble is Holmes's surety; it was not an offer so much as a prediction. Holmes is convinced that Watson will live in Baker Street again, and Watson has always been excessively susceptible to the detective's version of truth.

But, no. Watson resolves himself: he will overcome this on his own. He could not hold his head up as a man otherwise. He has been to war and witnessed the blackest kinds of depravity, and if he can survive that, he can survive this.

So he tacks postcards to the wall of his hotel room, and becomes acquainted with the shopkeepers on his new block, settling in securely and waiting for that sense of home to be reborn within him. The small voice in his mind laughs at his folly, but Watson is learning to ignore it.

He stumbles home drunk one night, proud that he still has enough coins in his pocket to jingle. His cane skids on the damp paving stone, the street far from steady beneath his feet.

Watson is thinking of Holmes, which is a known hazard of spending so much of his time drunk. Watson is thinking of the three weeks they spent in Paris some four months ago, Holmes lying shirtless in the nest of blankets on the floor, Holmes peering at the stone gargoyles as if he could glare them down from their perches, Holmes folding a hand around his friend's elbow and guiding him through the softer city. Those long days spent walking along the river together in the sun, and the raw weight of Holmes's heart in Watson's hands.

Paris, Watson thinks, Paris is where I loved him the most.

Someone is whimpering from an alley. Watson stops, leans hard on his cane. He squints into the dark and the whimper sounds again, high-pitched and helpless.

It's another battered child, Watson thinks, another mistreated son of the city. He hovers at the mouth of the alley, feeling at the stones with his cane, and thinks that he should leave well enough alone before he ends up back in gaol. The whimpering does not stop, and Watson finds that he has no intention of leaving.

"Ho there," Watson says experimentally. He expects a cry for mother and mercy, but instead is rewarded with an anxious bark. Watson blinks in surprise, and crouches, holds his hand out.

After a few hesitant seconds, a bulldog pup comes slinking cautiously out of the alley, ducking its blocky head and eyeing Watson with patent distrust. Watson makes small hushing sounds as the pup sniffs at his hand, stoically allows the doctor to rub the top of its head.

"What are you doing out here alone?" Watson asks. The pup nudges at his wrist, whining plaintively. Watson gathers the pup carefully to him, checking for any obvious injuries. The pup is male, white with splotches of brown, squat solid body squirming under Watson's hands. He's healthy, panting warmly and rubbing his cold nose on Watson's palm.

"All right," Watson says softly. He cradles the pup's head in one hand, turning big wet eyes up to him. "You'd better come with me, my boy. This night is not fit for man nor beast."

The pup yips, which Watson takes as acquiescence. He scoops up the little dog and tucks him inside his coat, feeling the small weight of paws pressing on his chest, and takes him back to his room.

They become fast friends. Watson empties out an old medical bag and refills it with bits of cloth so the pup will have a place to sleep. He adds the butcher's shop to his daily peregrinations, his pockets stuffed with scraps wrapped in wax paper, the pup leaping around his feet as he catches the scent. Watson finds that the hours of staring out the window while smoking cigarettes are less damaging to his psyche when he has a pup slumped across his lap.

Having the dog improves Watson's circumstances in more concrete ways as well. His dwindling wound pension will not support him, his awful habits, and a canine dependent all at once, and so the doctor is obliged to prioritise. His patronage of taverns and tables falls off accordingly, and he finds himself resurfacing from the morass of his dissolution . It is slow and painstaking, but for whole days at a time, his mind remains clear.

He calls the dog, 'Dog.' Sometimes he tries out other names--Rex and Bully and the like--but none of them take. The pup only answers a call when Watson has food in his hand.

When the doctor comes into the room, the dog trots over to butt at his shoes and lick his trousers. It is an incalculable relief to be greeted again, to feel that there is at least one being on the planet who would miss him if he were gone.

Out walking the dog in the park, Watson is accosted by a child with slight features reminiscent of a mongoose, hands crusted and black with grime. The boy puts himself in Watson's path, and the dog barks his consternation.

Watson raises his eyebrows. "Do you require assistance, lad?"

The boy's face crunches in a scowl, finding Watson lacking in some way. He points a grubby finger at the dog. "What's your dog's name?"

Watson blinks. "I have yet to decide."

"He doesn't have a name?" At the shake of Watson's head, the boy frowns darkly. "How can ye have a dog without a name?"

Shrugging, Watson says, "I appear to be managing."

The boy is greatly displeased with him, stamping his foot on the ground. "I'm meant learn the dog's name!"

Immediately, matters become clear to Watson. He sighs, rubs his shoulder with a weary hand. "Tell Mister Holmes I'll invite him to the christening."

Caught, at once flushed with dismay, the boy shouts, "I don't know no Mister Holmes," and then he spirits away, a tubercular blot on the delicate pastel colours of the women's skirts before disappearing into the crowd.

Watson crouches beside his dog, taking a bit of biscuit from his pocket and feeding it to him. The pup snuffles happily and licks the crumbs off Watson's palm. Watson scratches his ears, murmurs to him, "You are a great improvement over my last companion, I hope you know. Cleaner, far more amiable, better behaved in company. I do not need to worry about you."

The dog looks up at Watson adoringly. Watson's chest feels tight, and he stands, tugs the lead. The two walk on, linked together by a thin piece of leather, each wordlessly grateful that he is no longer alone.

(break)

Two days later, Watson takes his dog to Baker Street.

He cannot quite parse his motivations. To be sure, there is an element of spite involved. Holmes has ruthlessly diagnosed Watson, the fledgling drunk, the luckless gambler, and expected him to come crawling back home with his belly to the ground. Watson cannot bear the idea of Holmes thinking so ill of him; it makes him dejected and furious at the same time. He's bringing the dog at least partly so that Holmes might think he has been easily replaced.

There are other factors at play, of course. At the end of the day, it has been better than a month since Watson has seen his old friend. The lack has left the doctor skittish and worn, his nerves horribly frayed.

Also, he loves the dog, an affection so sudden and uncomplicated it seems miraculous. Watson wants to have his two favourite creatures in the same room; it doesn't seem like too much to ask.

Mrs Hudson opens the door to him, and though she is not the type of woman for eruptive joy at an unexpected reunion, it is clear that she is pleased to see him again. She scolds him for his leanness, asks him how he has been occupying his time and Watson lies as simply as breathing. He holds the pup in his arms and Mrs Hudson cups her work-reddened hands around his squarish head, cooing softly.

Watson cannot keep his eyes from darting up the stairs, his skin feeling too tight. Eventually, Mrs Hudson notices his preoccupation and shoos him upstairs after extracting a promise to take some food with him when he goes.

The seventeen steps have never seemed quite so mountainous. The pup wriggles against Watson's chest, paws planted on his shoulder, and Watson holds him like a shield, a precious offering.

Holmes is at his desk, bent over with jeweler's loupe screwed into his eye. He doesn't look up as Watson comes in, says in an unreadable tone:

"Good morning, Doctor. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Watson finds himself struck dumb. The dog speaks for him, an inquisitive yelp that brings Holmes's head up. The detective scrutinises the pair of them from across the room, his face made lopsided and mechanistic by the loupe. Holmes's mouth is thin and hard, his cheeks drawn.

"So this is the hound," Holmes says.

Catching one of the dog's paws between his thumb and fingers in a nervous gesture, Watson answers, "One of your minions communicated your interest in becoming acquainted with him."

"A former minion, I think you'll find. Discreet acts of espionage proved not to be his forte." Holmes pulls the loupe out his eye. "All right, bring him here, let's have a look."

Watson brings the dog over and sets him on top of the newspaper on Holmes's desk. The dog circles a few times, curious, tongue lolling out of his mouth. Holmes inspects him, tipping the pup's head this way and that. The pup gnaws harmlessly at Holmes's wrist, and Watson experiences a strange blooming feeling in his chest as he sees the slightest smile glint across Holmes's face.

The detective looks up. "He's the spit and image of the prime minister."

"Is he?" Watson manages, his throat dry.

Holmes nods assuredly, tugging on the pup's ears. "Seems better-tempered, as well."

"Yes, he--he's a good dog."

"Well then, we must name him. It isn't right, a dog without a name."

As he speaks, Holmes lowers his face until he is on eye-level with the pup, and they share a long moment of regard. The dog stands still with his head cocked slightly to the side, studying the detective as much as the detective is studying him. Watson watches them, wondering why it has become so difficult for him to swallow, and breathe, and think.

"Gladstone," Holmes pronounces. The dog barks, and Holmes nods. "His name is clearly Gladstone. The prime minister will be honoured, I'm sure."

Watson's hands curl into fists at his sides, and a witless smile takes control of his expression. Holmes glances up at him, one hand scruffing between Gladstone's ears. Their eyes meet with a crack so palpable that Watson shivers.

"We," Watson begins, but his voice is a hoarse rasping thing and so he stops, clears his throat into his fist. "We'll have to get another named Disraeli for him to fight."

The joke works marginally well. Holmes's mouth quirks a fraction of an inch, and he huffs out through his nose. Gladstone pads across the desk to Watson, his whole backside wagging with his tail. Watson pets him, happy to have something to do with his hands.

"So, Doctor," Holmes says, and his voice has changed ever so subtly, taking on the barest edge of frost. "You have finally come to see me without the impetus of a crisis."

Picking up his dog, Watson takes the chair near the window, where a litter of ash and wizened matches lets him know that Holmes too has spent his time sitting and staring.

"I wished for you to meet my dog," Watson says honestly enough, and then adds, "And to ask again that you call off your surveillance of me."

"No, I don't think that will be happening."

"Holmes-"

"There's no point, Watson." Holmes is implacable, face set like a portrait. "The best you can do is badger me into a false promise, and I know how you hate it when I lie to you."

"Why?" Watson asks, too sharp. "Do me the small courtesy of answering that, at least. What possible satisfaction could you be deriving from second-hand accounts of my movements?"

Holmes laughs at him. It carries a cruel jarring undertone and Gladstone lifts his head off Watson's knee to bark back at him.

"It's extraordinary that you still know so little of me," Holmes says. "I derive no satisfaction from it. I am compelled, do you understand that? You may have removed yourself from my scrutiny, but that hasn't left me any less captivated. My methods have merely adapted to the distance."

Watson shakes his head. "You cannot expect me to tolerate such excessive invasiveness."

"I don't. I expect you to come to your senses and move back in here so that my invasiveness might become redundant."

A breath sticks in Watson's throat. He curls his fingers under the plain collar he'd bought for Gladstone. "We have already discussed this."

"No, we attempted a discussion, which was curtailed rather abruptly by you charging out into the rain without so much as a by-your-leave. Or shoes, for that matter."

Holmes leans back in his chair, delving into the doctor with his dark eyes jittery with interest. Watson withstands it, his shoulders straight and a dull flush colouring his face. He doesn't say anything.

"You look better than when last we spoke," Holmes admits at length, grudging.

Watson latches onto it with the fervour of a new convert. "Yes, I have--I have been better able to sleep, of late."

This is actually a lie; caring for Gladstone had taken Watson away from the bottle and without its stuporous mercy the nights are long and wakeful.

"Hmm," Holmes says, and Watson doesn't think the detective believes him. A slithering bit of petulance introduces itself into Watson's mood.

"You also look well," Watson says, making the insincerity plain in the curdled edge of his voice.

Holmes's eyes narrow. He is worn, reduced, as if the first layer of muscle has been carved away, and his eyes, still brilliant, still capable of freezing time, are sunken, ringed with the kohl of insomnia. He is wearing one of Watson's shirts, the seam ripped so the sleeve hangs open to his elbow, and Watson can see the prominent bones of his wrist pressing hungrily against the skin.

"Flattery will get you nowhere," Holmes tells him. "Particularly such a blatantly false strain of it."

Watson moves his shoulders in half a shrug. He pets his dog and looks away out the window, down at the grey rustle of the morning. Holmes huffs; he has never liked it when Watson turns his attention elsewhere.

"Perhaps this is one of those instances where I expect too much of you, but I thought it'd be rather obvious by now," Holmes says.

"What's that?"

"Neither of us has benefited from this separation. It has been nearly three months now; how much longer would you have us suffer in isolation?"

Gladstone squirms on Watson's lap and so he sets the pup on the floor to explore the jumbled chaos of the room, innocent and unafraid. The doctor weaves his fingers and rubs his thumb on the palm of his hand, not meeting Holmes's eyes.

"I had my reasons for leaving, and those reasons have not changed," Watson says to the books on the shelf behind Holmes, which lean precariously against each other like drunken friends.

Holmes makes a dismissive sound in the back of his throat--"tchah!"--and says, "You left because you were frightened of the extent of your feelings for me, and mine for you."

"That--that is not-"

"That is what happened," Holmes says, as sharp as a sabre. "Please do not insult me with obfuscation."

Watson says nothing. He stares at the books on the shelf and kneads his hands together, his throat ducking with compulsive swallows. It is impossible for him to refute Holmes.

"Now," Holmes continues, a ghostly chill crystallising his words. "As we will no longer be engaging in those certain behaviours that so damagingly honed our affection for each other, we no longer need fear a second like catastrophe. You may resume your rightful place at my side sanguinely, and in good faith."

Insane man, Watson thinks with something like desperation, though Holmes is as reasoned and articulate as ever, as devastatingly honest as he once swore he would be. Watson has feared the truth from Holmes for a long time now. It's much easier for him to think of his friend as mad.

"I do not see how removing the, the, the physical aspect of our relations is going to resolve the emotional dilemma," Watson manages at last.

"Then you're not looking closely enough." The casual superiority in Holmes's voice makes something yearn fiercely within Watson for a moment. The detective goes on, "We were friends once. That was an agreeable state of affairs, was it not?"

Watson's mouth opens, because it is a simple question, with only one legitimate answer, but Holmes does not wait for him. Holmes is reading from a script in his mind, the finely-hewn arguments that he has had weeks to prepare. Already, a deep sense of inevitability has begun to creep down Watson's spine.

"It is plain to me now, where we went astray. Most of the blame is mine, I'm afraid. I did not fully comprehend what was happening to me, and so acted in advance of the facts--it was an unpardonable breach of my standards. I instigated our sexual relationship intending to dispel the unfortunate desires that had developed between us. This was clearly misguided. We achieved the precise opposite."

Here Holmes stops, and his expression briefly becomes so wistful it seems crippling, breaking on the angles of his eyebrows. Watson sits still, his vision fuzzy for a moment but then he realises it's because he's holding his breath. The moment plays out.

"So, we have made mistakes. So be it. There is a chance here, Watson, a chance. There is no mercy in this world, but on the rarest of occasions there is redemption."

Holmes's voice catches and cracks, and he flinches, balls his fist on the desk and pushes on ahead.

"We can solve this," Holmes says, as certain as the sea. "There is no point in denying the scope of the feeling between us, and so we must reform it, bend it to a better purpose. We shall be brothers, you see."

Holmes takes a fast breath as if he means to continue, but then says no more. He leaves it there between them, a gauntlet thrown down. A long spate of silence becomes like a living thing in the room, a tangible presence.

With all the care he possesses, Watson answers, "I do not think of you in that way."

A bit of light flinches through Holmes's eyes. "You can learn."

"As you have? You are able to look at me and not want-" and Watson stops short, bites his tongue.

"Don't be absurd," Holmes says. "I am not able to think of you and not want you. That's not that point. It's action that matters, Watson--it's the deed itself. Everything else is of the mind, and you cannot be made culpable for the deceits of your mind, not so long as your hands stay clean."

Watson shakes his head, but his throat does not seem to work, and he knows that Holmes is winning. Holmes is pulling him back in, inch by inch and word by word, every second that Watson breathes the air of this well-loved room and understands it as home. Leaving this place is going to feel like a flaying, Watson knows, and that is Holmes's fault. Everything is Holmes's fault.

"It won't work," Watson says, somewhat breathless. "We cannot live in such proximity and still keep our distance."

"You exhibit a disturbing lack of faith, old boy."

"Holmes-"

"You miss my company," Holmes interrupts. His eyes are ablaze; he can sense Watson struggling futilely in the palm of his hand. "You miss these rooms, and the view out of that window."

"Of course I do, but that isn't-"

"You become something less when you are not with me," Holmes says baldly, and Watson's body jerks, a moment of pained shock.

"Please, quit talking," Watson says like a prisoner begging for bread. Holmes pays him exactly no heed.

"I don't mean to suggest that you're alone in your trials. I am only half a man myself, you know. It's been a miserable spring."

"Holmes, please."

It's too loud, the stentorian echo clapping against the walls, and Holmes stops, his eyes going very wide and his throat bobbing. Holmes is shaking, Watson notices in a far-off kind of way. The fine falling spikes of his hair are trembling against his forehead.

"You'll convince me," Watson tells him with an edge of desperation. "You know the sway you have over me, you know that I cannot--I cannot think."

"You have me for that," Holmes says.

"Yes, and a great deal of good you've done me," Watson says on a sneer, his lip curled for a moment before he eradicates it. He takes a breath, pulls himself under control. "I should go."

"Oh yes, run away again, and just when things are getting interesting."

"Be quiet," Watson says sharply as he stands. His legs feel made of water, the familiar creak of pain lancing through him.

Holmes levels a captious look at him, his eyes flat and as keen as a knife's edge. "You ask such impossible things of me."

"I ask the impossible? You, you are insufferable, you are not human," and Watson is almost sputtering, stupid with anger and several other things. He whistles curtly and Gladstone emerges from beneath the sideboard, trundling over to sniff at the doctor's shoes and trousers. Watson picks the dog up, forcibly keeping his shoulders straight.

"You're going to regret all of this, you know," Holmes tells him as Watson hurries for the door.

"I regret it already," Watson says without thinking, and he is mindless enough to look back, and see the hard flash of pain across Holmes's features, and then the door is shut between them and Watson is alone on the landing with Gladstone in his arms.

Watson counts the seventeen steps as he walks down. Pressure builds like sinking underwater, all his vital organs smashed flat, and he stumbles through the front door, back into the wet drone of the midday world.

Pulling his coat over Gladstone's curled shivering body, Watson spares a glance up at the windows of 221B, and there is Holmes silhouetted and austere through the sparkling glass. Their eyes meet through the distance and the weather, and Watson finds his mouth curling in a bitter half-smile. Holmes has played him perfectly, of course. It might be weeks before Watson's obstinate pride allows him to return home, but the crux of the matter is unchanged: Holmes will win.

Given enough time, Holmes always wins.

(break)

THEN

After they returned from France, four or five months passed that were easily the best of Sherlock Holmes's life.

Everything came together for him. Every case was rife with intrigue, plot twists, double crosses. Every villain was colourfully verbose despite being as dumb as a fence post. Holmes put his hand to dangerous chemical experiments, recently composed violin sonatas, the ancient Japanese art of origami--nothing was beyond his talents. He felt touched by luck, clever and strong and eternally young.

Such was his condition when he and Watson spent several weeks living in a hovel in Deptford, passing as morally suspect laborers attempting to get recruited by a growing network of larceners that had recently caught the detective's attention. The two of them shared one small room, a single pallet and a blanket that had holes big enough for two fingers. They ate with their hands, standing at the mouths of alleys watching the people pour past in ragged clumps. Drunk on the cheapest gin, they stumbled through ill-lit hallways, clutching each other for balance and laughing helplessly and muffled like boys sneaking in after curfew.

It was inconvenient and uncomfortable, that tiny rathole of a room, the violent dead-faced men they were obliged to befriend. Big smoke-coloured rats with ophidian eyes scurried along the hallways, and Holmes dreamt of the plague years. He was always hungry, always dirty, and happy in a bone-deep way that simmered uncertainly under his skin. Holmes did not trust the feeling, but he cherished it all the same.

One morning, the detective woke up in a patch of oily sunlight. Watson's arm was slung heavily over his chest, pressing the air thin in his lungs. Holmes curled a hand near Watson's ribs, feeling the thrumming heat of him.

"Are you awake?" Watson murmured against Holmes's shoulder. Holmes scratched him lightly in response, felt Watson's mouth curving in a smile.

They lay there for a quiet moment. Holmes's chest expanded slowly and then Watson's followed suit, as if they were sharing breath. Holmes closed his eyes to better isolate the sound of Watson's skin brushing against his own.

"Have you decided our course of action for the day?" Watson asked.

Holmes traced his thumb along the hook of Watson's lowest rib. "I'll speak to that scoundrel Lockhart again. He knows far more about this business than he claims, I'm certain of it."

"And what shall I do?"

"You shall wait for me here."

A moue of dissatisfaction crimps Watson's mouth. "That doesn't sound like a very engaging task."

Holmes spread one hand out wide of Watson's chest, studying the contrast of colour and texture. Watson's heart tripped along, a peaceful thrumming rhythm.

"I have every confidence in you," Holmes mumbled, not entirely paying attention to the conversation anymore. He was watching his hands move over Watson's body, tracking the slow flush as it moved across the doctor's skin. Holmes was fascinated.

Watson's hand curled around the back of his head and drew him up into a kiss, stale and heated and altogether wonderful. Holmes rolled himself on top of his friend and murmured into his mouth, "You are quite eager today, my dear doctor."

Watson stroked his hands down Holmes's sides, latched on to his hips, his body a long string pulled taut and hard. "Every day," he said, distracted.

"Yes." Holmes leaned down and licked the cup of Watson's collarbone. A small gasp caught in the air, and Watson's head fell slackly to the side, offering his throat to his friend.

"Do you know," Holmes said absently, "that I would give everything, and all I have-"

He stopped, because Watson was fairly writhing beneath him, biting his lip to keep quiet. Holmes shifted his hips slightly, pressing into Watson's growing hardness. Both of them were stripped to the skin, the friction raw and hot and building like a wave. Watson made a choked sound that might have been Holmes's name, and his fingers dug in helplessly. Holmes thought that Watson would leave marks, and he thought, good.

They came together so easily. Watson rocked against him, maddening desire scraping up Holmes's spine, and the little room filled with ragged breathing, interrupted moans. Holmes slid a hand up the outside of Watson's thigh, drawing his leg up to achieve a sharper angle. His forehead rested sweaty and slick against Watson's own, shaky breath falling on his lips.

"Holmes," Watson said, and then again, "Holmes," as his body arched beautifully, his head rolling back as he fought through his climax. Holmes went still above him, staring raptly.

The tension fell out of Watson, and he became limp, panting with a woozy smile finding its way onto his face. His eyes fluttered open, that flawless blue shine like fallen sky, and Holmes experienced a strange tightening sensation in his chest, a lock twisting shut.

"Come along, old boy," Watson murmured, and guided Holmes's hip with his hand, making a breath snag in the detective's throat. "You wouldn't leave me alone, I'm sure."

Holmes did not respond; the language had escaped him. The world had narrowed down to the cracked stained walls, the rough hemp weave of the pallet, the sinful push and give of Watson's body beneath him. Holmes set a fumbling hand on Watson's face, thumbed open his mouth. He did not kiss the doctor, preferring instead to thrust against the slick plane of his stomach and stare down at his own hand holding Watson's mouth open.

Watson said, "That's it, that's perfect," ill-formed and slurred, and Holmes groaned, dropped his face onto Watson's shoulder and finished in a shuddering rush. His fingers jerked on Watson's face, pulling away from his lips and leaving faint damp marks on his cheek. Pleasure hummed under his skin, release as sweet and all-encompassing as the very best kinds of drugs. Holmes was caught up, obscured for a long moment.

"Holmes?" Watson enquired, breaking the spell. Holmes grunted, still lying full atop his friend. Watson poked at his shoulder, then smoothed a hand down the gentle curve.

"How much longer do you suppose this sojourn of ours will last?" Watson asked after another serene respite.

Holmes rolled off Watson with a thump and a gasp, the pallet rasping against his oversensitive skin. "Three days at the least."

"Hmm," Watson hmm'ed. His fingers played idly down the crooked line of Holmes's arm.

"Are you pining for home?" Holmes asked, turning his head to look at his friend.

A slight smile graced Watson's expression, and he shook his head, gazing up at the ceiling as if they were in a chapel in Vatican City.

"No," Watson said. "Recently I've discovered that my home has become a moveable feast."

"Yes," Holmes said, and then because it was so entirely true, he said again, "Yes," and touched the place where his body lay along Watson's, ensuring that there was no space between them.

They were another five days in Deptford, as a matter of fact. Holmes squirrelled his way into the band of thieves and won them over with his visceral stories and the coldness of his glare. The upcoming heist began coalesce into solid fact, and Holmes passed Watson notes in crowded taverns, pressed against him for a few spare moments. Watson didn't like leaving Holmes in such company, but the detective would hear nothing about it, patting his friend on the cheek condescendingly to make Watson scowl.

And then things went to hell.

It happened fast. That was what Holmes would remember forever afterwards, how fast it happened, how immediately the world turned on its end. He had left Watson clutching his revolver in an alley, warning the doctor to wait for his signal before alerting the police. Watson told him, "Don't get killed," just like he always did, and Holmes gave him a puckish smirk, just like he always did, and disappeared into the dilapidated building.

It was meant to be an ambush. Holmes would ensure that the boss of the gang, a massive-shouldered man with a bald testudineous skull, was present, and upon Watson's relay of his signal, Scotland Yard would sweep in and the matter would be resolved. Holmes came into the warehouse and resolutely trained his gaze away from the window where Watson would be crouched and peering. His mind ran with data, convoluted and over-full.

And then it happened so fast. The loose cluster of men turned as Holmes approached, and there was one among them that the detective did not recognise, although something about the troglodytic hunch of his brow rang familiar. All the men were watching him, and Holmes's gait slowed, a distrustful look tightening his features.

"All right, lads?" Holmes said in the craggy voice of the lawless character he was playing.

The new man gave him a chilling smile, and stepped forward. "Good evening, Mister Holmes. We've been waiting for you."

They set upon him. Holmes whirled and spun, struck someone in the face, wet crunch of a nose shattering, and kicked someone else's legs out, but they were too many. A blackjack came smiting down and Holmes fell to his knees, his eyes wheeling and crazed. Still his brain whirred, flung bits of evidence at him like sand in a harmattan. They knew his name. They had discovered him, and sold their knowledge to this man with the prehistoric face, this vaguely familiar man that Holmes had never seen before.

You're in trouble, Holmes noted to himself, fists and cudgels falling in a pulverising rain. One of the men was snarling predictable imprecations against his mother. Intractable points of pain were blooming all over his body, and a final swift blow drove him to the ground, wiped the fight out of him.

Half-conscious, he was dragged down the length of the warehouse, limp hands scraping across the floor. With his head lolling bonelessly, Holmes turned his eyes up to the filthy window where Watson was meant to be, but it was empty now, hollow.

Holmes closed his eyes for a split second, thinking frantically, don't, don't, but it was too late, and Watson was banging through the door, shouting with savagery and dismay.

No, Holmes thought, and no no no, as the men turned towards the doctor and their black-handled weapons rose in unison like a funeral salute. Shots exploded. Bullets splintered the floor. Holmes saw Watson stagger backwards, sudden agony wrenching his face, and the detective screamed out loud. The effort fractured him, and he sank into merciful unconsciousness.

(break)

When Holmes awoke, he was tied to a chair.

There was a mossy scent to the air, and no windows, and Holmes understood that the room was subterranean. It was solid black, as if he'd been dropped in a pot of ink.

"Watson?" Holmes said in a weathered tone. He said it again, twice then three times.

There was no answer, and a net began to close around Holmes, fearful sweat breaking out on his skin. It was so dark; the only thing Holmes could see was Watson's face as the bullet struck home, harrowed and ugly with pain.

Holmes tested his bonds, striving hard with his shoulders jerking, his head bowed and neck stiff. Injuries made themselves known all over his body, bruises shadowing tangibly under his clothes. He had several broken fingers, and several cracked ribs. There was a gash in his leg, the lower part of his trousers soaked in blood and clinging to him.

Watson was not here. Possible scenarios flooded through Holmes's mind, merciless in their detail. Watson was dead on the floor of the warehouse, the hole in his chest bleeding a dark lake around him. Watson had been hauled still breathing through the streets and thrown in the river to drown. Watson had been kicked to death, every bone in his body crushed. It was grisly, horrifying, Watson shaking and coughing red, as limp as a bundle of rags.

"No," Holmes whispered. He twisted against the ropes, barbs of lancing pain taking his breath and sharpening his thoughts.

Just then a strip was ripped off the fabric of the world, and white light poured into the room. Holmes gasped and hissed, screwing his eyes shut. Heavy footfalls came into the room, two men--no, three. One of them dragged his right leg slightly. One of them whistled and snorted through a deviated septum.

"Awake at last, are we?"

A meaty hand cuffed Holmes's head. He ducked away, baring his teeth. Rage boiled up in him like a cresting drunk; he wanted to kill all three with his hands, press his face close to watch the light wink out of their eyes.

"Is he sensible?" one of the men asked. "Charlie wants him sensible."

Blunt grimy fingers manhandled Holmes's head up, turned his eyes into the light. He lunged and bit sharply into the air, his teeth clicking together. The man jerked back, swearing.

"Sensible enough," the man said, and hit Holmes with an exploding backhand that snapped his head to the side. Now his mouth was bleeding, slick ferric taste coating his tongue.

"Now you sit still," the man said, a vicious wire of a smile contorting his face. His teeth were rotted black and brown. "You might take the time to make your peace with God--we're going to kill you, you know."

"You're going to try," Holmes corrected him, and spat blood on the man's boots.

"Aye," the man said, and playfully tapped the barrel of his revolver on Holmes's forehead. "We're going to try."

They turned away from him to form a small cabal, left him to suffocate slowly from his many minor injuries. Holmes wished to be taunted and scorned, needing the energy gifted by rage. He wanted whatever was going to happen to him to happen now, immediately and at once. He couldn't abide waiting.

His broken fingers hurt so badly his vision kept fuzzing over. Holmes forced his attention back to the men, absorbing what he could of them. In the wings of his mind, behind the short curtains, Watson jerked backwards over and over again, his hand flying to his chest. Holmes ignored it, banished the breath-taking panic that welled within him. He couldn't do anything for the doctor until he got out of this chair.

There wasn't long to wait, at least. The man with the deviated septum left briefly and returned with the one from the warehouse, the one who had said Holmes's name. Again, Holmes's memory hummed with off-kilter recognition, that sense of having known someone very much like this stranger before him now.

"Have you worked it out yet, Holmes?" the stranger said, eyeing the bound detective with the brutal look of a boy preparing to kick a dog.

Holmes didn't answer, seeing no margin in it. The stranger began pulling on a pair of black gloves with the air of an executioner's ritual.

"Allow me to aid you in your quest for enlightenment," the stranger said, as bright as a professor at the slate. "For your crimes, which are legion, you are about to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. Familiar sentence, no? I thought it only too apt."

The threads drew together for Holmes. The gallows, that was where he had seen that protrudent brow before, the Neanderthal ridge over shrewd piggish eyes.

"Cyril Willingham's brother," Holmes said, disgusted. The injustice of the family was without end.

"Charles Montjoy, lovely to make your acquaintance. Cyril's cousin, in point of fact, though we were brothers of spirit, certainly. Grew up right alongside each other, you understand."

"And both of you turned out so well."

"Shut your mouth or I'll cut out your tongue," Montjoy said, the cheerfully sincere menace in his voice sending a painful shiver through Holmes's frame.

"I saw you at his hanging, looking like you watching a play. You have marched many men to the gallows, have you not? I consider it a true privilege to show you the other side of the rope."

Montjoy took a length of rope from one of his fellows and tossed it over a hook set in the ceiling. There were other such hooks, rusty and dangerous-looking, and Holmes understood that he was in the basement of a butcher's shop. Montjoy let the noose fall to bounce jauntily, strung it up high and passed the end of the rope to the man with the deviated septum. He came back to Holmes, grinning.

"Oh, yes, I'm going to enjoy this," Montjoy said, and punched Holmes in the face.

It was a drop of pain in a monsoon. Red pressure seeped through his brain, and he shook his head briskly to clear it. One of the men came behind him to cut his bonds, jarring Holmes's broken fingers and making him hiss. The detective was jerked up, shoved and pummelled over to the dangling rope.

So, you are going to die, Holmes thought. He looked up at the noose, feeling a spill of cold resignation, as if some part of him had always known it would end like this.

You are going to die, Holmes thought again, and he asked, "Did you kill the man behind me?"

"Shut up, I told you," Montjoy said, watching with black glee as Holmes's hands were tied behind his back again.

"There was a man who came in behind me," Holmes insisted, blinking fast in the dim light. "He was shot--did you leave him alive?"

His only response was another punch in the face. Holmes greyed out for a moment, his head hanging limp. Behind his eyes, Watson was sitting too close to him in a train compartment, and smiling, and rolling his eyes. Holmes felt the noose being slipped around his neck, an abrasive rasp against his skin.

"No," Holmes muttered, and last-ditch strength flooded him. He struggled fiercely, lashing out with his legs, demanding hoarsely, "Is he alive?"

"Hold him--hold him, you useless git," Montjoy snarled at one of his compatriots. Heavy hands clamped on Holmes's shoulders and a revolver was cocked against his temple, forcing him still.

"Is he alive?" Holmes said again. He wasn't interested in the noose around his neck, the revolver at his head, the abattoir in which he had awakened. He didn't care about any of this. His voice was almost gone, and Holmes begged, "Is he alive?"

"Will those be your last words, I wonder?" Montjoy said, reaching up to tighten the noose.

"Tell me, tell me-" and Holmes was delirious from fear and pain now, his eyes gaping and dry.

Montjoy grabbed two hard handfuls of Holmes's hair and yanked his head up. Eye to eye, Montjoy showed a smile that looked like a bloody hatchet.

"He's dead," Montjoy told him. The world inside the detective ground to a halt, and Montjoy's lip curled victoriously. "Another man dead because of you, Sherlock Holmes."

He was lying. Holmes was certain of it. It didn't seem to matter at all; his blood had frozen. His heart was a rock now.

This must not register on an emotional level, Holmes thought. From a great distance, he was aware of Montjoy jerking the noose snug against his throat, air suddenly precious and rare. Holmes stood armless, unmanned, his wrists bound behind him. The fight was gone from him, and the light, the hope, every good day he'd ever known--all of it had been driven away.

Montjoy stepped back, surveyed Holmes's dire predicament with satisfaction. He gestured to the men holding the rope, and they pulled hard, drawing Holmes up onto his toes. Holmes choked, great glassy stars filling his vision, spiralling pain in his head. He closed his eyes, and thought of John Watson.

"For my cousin," Montjoy said. "For every man you have brought to his end. Do you have any last words?"

The pressure on his throat lessened as the men let the rope slacken, and Holmes sank onto the flats of his feet again. He kept his eyes closed, and said not a word. In his mind, Watson was lying with him on a thin pallet in a filthy room, telling him that they were home.

"Do it," Montjoy said, and the two men pulled hard, hefted Holmes off the ground. The toes of his boots stirred up faint dust, and then lost contact entirely.

He couldn't breathe, of course, and he was going to die, and that wasn't even the worst thing that had happened to him today.

His heartbeat thundered, multiplied and filled his head to overflowing. The world was ending, and the Angel Gabriel did not blow a trumpet, but instead beat a planet-sized drum. Holmes thought he would go mad from the cacophony, and then remembered that he was currently being murdered, and so it didn't matter.

All outside awareness fled from him. He could not hear or see or feel, and that was only to the good.

Watson, Holmes thought, and clung to it with everything he had left. He was going to die with blue eyes in his mind, and nothing else.

And then suddenly, someone had an arm wrapped around Holmes's legs, holding him up. The rope gave just enough for a skinny breath of oxygen to suffuse him, his throat burning as if it were vaporised acid.

Holmes's eyes flew open. The room was awash with action, a brace of blue-suited police constables grappling with Montjoy and his men. Holmes's hearing triggered back on, assaulted by grunts and gasps of pain, and someone was saying his name, chanting it in a desperate song.

Holmes looked down, and of course it was the good doctor. It could have been no one else.

Watson's face was wrenched with terror and exertion, his teeth showing. He had his chin dug into Holmes's stomach, one arm clenched around the detective's legs to support his weight and the other bent in a sling and pressed between them. Holmes met his eyes and saw something unprecedented break across Watson's expression, a collapsing relief that was so intense it should have been fatal.

"Breathe," Watson told him through gritted teeth, and then turned his head, and screamed for someone to cut the rope that Montjoy's men had tied to a bit of piping on the wall. Hearing Watson scream like that made Holmes shudder, and moan from the pain.

The rope was cut, and Holmes slammed down, briefly on his feet but he could not feel his legs and so crashed into Watson, knocking them both to the floor. Watson cried out, and Holmes rolled off him, graceless with his hands still tied behind his back.

Holmes attempted to say the doctor's name, but his throat was smashed flat and only produced a tortured wheeze. He butted his head into Watson's shoulder instead, rubbed his nose on the coarse wool of Watson's jacket, trusting him to understand. The riot around them was calming, Montjoy and his men forced to their knees against the wall with the constables ringed around them.

Watson's hands pulled the noose off and cradled Holmes's head for a second, thumbs solid on his cheekbones, and then shifted him carefully so Watson could put a blade to the bonds around his wrists. Holmes sagged with the freedom, deep cramps sinking talons in under his shoulder blades.

"Your fingers are broken," Watson said in a whisper.

"Not all of them," Holmes whispered back, his voice like something scraped off the floor.

Watson's seeking hands mapped out the ravaged landscape of Holmes's body, brushing over his cracked ribs and the livid burn sure to be developing on his throat. Holmes couldn't take his eyes off his friend's face.

"My apologies for not arriving sooner," Watson said, darting a nervy look at Holmes.

Holmes made a weak gesture through the air. "I found your timing impeccable," he croaked.

A steady hand curved under Holmes's head, and Watson helped him sit up. "I'm taking you home."

The room dove and whirled like a dervish as Holmes nodded. "Yes, my dear, I think that would be best."

And then he passed out again.

(break)

Holmes awoke first in the back of a cab, and then again as Watson and two constables muscled him up the seventeen steps, his feet tripping and catching. The detective had his eyes open long enough to make a brief flurry of deductions: he was home, he was alive, Watson had been shot in the shoulder, Watson was shaking with miserable fury, the constable on his right was distracted by thoughts of his dying mother, and then Holmes let the darkness have him again.

The next he knew, he was on the settee, no longer wearing his trousers, and Watson was stitching the gash in his leg. There was an ethereal sheen to everything, and Holmes recognised it as a low dose of laudanum, beating back the worst of the pain. For a long thoughtless moment, Holmes watched the meticulous crawl of Watson's fingers, the snaking near-invisible thread, the pinprick glint off the needle.

"You have three cracked ribs," Watson told him. "And three broken fingers. How does your throat feel?"

Holmes made a powerless groaning sound. Watson nodded, eyes fixed on his task. "It'll be tender for a week or so."

Holmes studied him narrowly, struggling through a haze that felt more concussive than narcotic. Watson was stitching with one hand, his other arm in a sling. Holmes reached out cautiously and touched Watson's shoulder, a curious tapping of splinted fingers that made Watson's mouth go thin and tense.

"You came after me," Holmes said in his destroyed voice.

"Yes."

"You were shot."

"Yes. Do stop talking, Holmes."

Holmes obliged, his mind cluttered with dim pain and shuffled memory. His throat felt like a rag wrung dry. There were sad lines on Watson's face, pulling down the corners of his mouth.

At last the doctor finished, and put aside the needle, and framed Holmes's leg in his hand, staring down at it.

"I can't do this anymore," Watson said so low that Holmes knew he didn't really want to be heard.

"What?" Holmes asked.

"I, I," and Watson forcibly stopped himself, took a deep breath. He wasn't looking at Holmes. "I did not think I would survive it."

"The bullet?" Holmes sat up too quickly, his ribs crying out, and Watson set a hand on his shoulder, pushed him back down.

"No, not the bullet," Watson said. "It was. You were taken. They took you."

The doctor was having difficulty, his brow knotted, the words mulish and uncooperative. His good hand was in a fist on Holmes's leg. Holmes lay there in his shirtsleeves and underclothes, watching the doctor with feverish intensity.

"I have never experienced anything like it," Watson confessed, hushed and faintly ashamed. "This fear, this, this unholy, unbearable--it consumed me. I could not feel the bullet in my shoulder. I could not think. It was only you. You were taken and I--I was crippled. Maimed."

Holmes shook his head, an icy feeling solidifying in his stomach. "You found me; it couldn't have been so severe."

"Scotland Yard found you. I was barely able to follow."

"Your shoulder-"

"It was not my shoulder. Holmes. It was not my shoulder."

A shudder went through Watson, and he bowed his head, his back curving like a protective shell. A hateful flush stained his cheeks. Holmes stared at him, entranced.

"I have never been so scared," Watson told him. "I do not have the words--I felt like I would die. I wished I would. Do you--do you understand? I would have rather been dead than live in that agony one moment longer."

Holmes said nothing for a long moment, and then, "Do not do this."

Watson's head snagged up, guilt dancing across his face. "I, I don't know what-"

"You intend to leave me," Holmes said, and the plain fact of it broke a series of strings in him, sent him careening quietly into despair.

Staring at his hand where it still rested on Holmes's leg, Watson whispered, "I must."

"No," and Holmes was going to explain to him why it was so absurd, why there was no reason in the wide world that they should be parted, but Watson was already on his feet, pacing away, saying fast:

"I believed myself capable of this, I truly did. I was already--you were already of such importance to me, and I did not imagine that it could worsen. I, I never thought, I could not-"

And Watson stopped. He drew in a ragged breath, and fumbled a cigarette out of his case one-handed. Tremors infested him as he attempted to strike a match, the cigarette shivering in his mouth like an arrow stuck in a tree.

"It's not just your most recent ordeal," Watson continued finally. "Although you must know that I will never escape the memory of you hanging there. I did not know until that moment how utterly I have come to rely on you."

Holmes sat up gingerly, favouring his ribs, and tracked the doctor's movements back and forth across the room, the slender twists of smoke trailing behind him like a knight's banderole. For once the detective's mind was blank, bearing silent witness.

"This, it's too dangerous. The risk is unacceptable." Watson shot Holmes a glance, looking weary and shredded. "I could not live through seeing you dead. It would decimate me."

"And what will this do?" Holmes asked, asperity clipping his tone. "What benefit do you imagine you're bestowing with this cruel effort?"

Watson smoked nervously, standing near the window where he had stood a thousand times before. "It is not--I'm not--I don't know." The doctor shook his head, frustrated. "I cannot be expected to stand by, to, to, to merely observe as you throw yourself into the fire time and again."

"So instead, I am expected to abandon the only livelihood I have ever found remotely palatable?"

"No!" and Watson looked startled, his refusal immediate and vehement. "I would never ask that of you. I know what your profession means to you."

He appeared about to say more, but then thought better of it, and held his tongue. They stared at each other from across the room, only smoke between them.

"You have always known the risks with which I live," Holmes said eventually. "Surely one near-death experience is not enough to shake your faith in my abilities."

Watson's eyes dropped, and he turned away from Holmes to stub his cigarette out. Holmes understood from the slight gesture that Watson's faith had indeed been shaken, and was now as delicate and frangible as the thinnest crystal. Holmes investigated the sinking sensation this revelation elicited in his stomach, and could find no proper words to define it.

Training his eyes over Holmes's left shoulder, Watson told him, "It's been more than one, Holmes. This was just the worst. The--the closest. And I'm sorry." Watson swallowed, not liking the taste of the word but he pressed onwards. "You must understand, I'm not as strong as I once was. My mind cannot tolerate such horrors anymore."

"Ah, I see," Holmes said on a sneer, striving to feel only anger and the physical pain of this moment, because those things he knew how to withstand. "The trouble isn't that I'm fated for an early grave, it's that your bloody nerves can't stomach even the vague possibility."

Swallowing again, still not looking directly at his friend, Watson said, "I'm sorry. I'll say it as many times as you wish."

"Don't-" and Holmes went to stand without thinking, a firebomb detonating in his chest at the sudden movement, and he collapsed back, gasping. His eyes slammed shut, and he worked on breathing, thinking like a mumbled rosary, it'll pass it'll pass it'll pass.

"Are you all right? Holmes? Can you speak?"

Watson hovered over him, and even with his eyes closed Holmes could see the stricken expression on Watson's face, the jumpy flutter of his good hand. A deeply affecting strain of déjà vu overtook Holmes for a moment, spurred by breathless pain and the concern in Watson's voice. He kept his eyes closed until the laudanum resumed its slow numbing seep and his mind could separate out emotion from fact again.

One splinted hand to his chest, Holmes looked up at the doctor, wilfully keeping his face clean of any undue agony. To a stranger peering into the room, Watson would have been the one who looked heartbroken.

"Steady on," Holmes said. "You make a very gangly mother hen, you know."

"You must be careful," Watson said with that familiar scolding edge that made Holmes's skin crawl.

"I wish you wouldn't speak to me as if I were a child," Holmes snapped.

"I'm sorry," Watson said as if a button had been pressed. Holmes grimaced.

"My dear fellow, please believe me when I tell you that the next time I hear those words from your mouth, I shall be obliged to resort to violence."

Watson ran his hand over his hair and shifted his weight, distress bleeding out of his every movement. It was difficult for Holmes to see his friend like this, that destructive temper of his turned inward.

"This is precisely what I cannot do," Watson said in a rush. "I cannot see you damaged. I never forget whose body I'm stitching together, leaving all these, these scars-" and his voice cracked hard.

The doctor turned away, ducking his shoulders shamefully. He covered his face with his hand, a penitential sorrow emanating from him.

"You'd leave me alone instead?" Holmes asked hoarsely. "You know I am at my best when you are with me, so how will I fare now?"

"Don't, please don't do that," Watson begged, but Holmes wasn't listening to him anymore.

"You find it so difficult to see me thrashed, I wonder how you'll feel when you read of my death in the newspaper, knowing you might have been there to save me. Grief or guilt, Watson, which do you suppose will prove the victor?"

It was a genuinely vicious thing to say. Holmes watched shocked misery blanch Watson's expression, and the detective suffered a stab of bitter satisfaction at knowing that they were both in pain.

"It will be both, of course," Watson managed in a crooked little whisper. "It will be both, and each with enough strength and fury to kill me on its own."

"There, you see," Holmes said eagerly. "You cannot wish for it to end like that."

"I don't. I pray to God it does not." A humourless smile curved Watson's mouth briefly. "Of course, I've prayed for a lot of things that never happened."

"Watson-"

"You must let me go, Holmes," Watson told him, as quiet and forlorn as Holmes had ever seen him.

Holmes blinked, and said without thought, "I cannot."

"Please," and Watson's voice cracked once more. "I have given you everything. Grant me this one last request."

"No," Holmes said, and then again, louder, "No."

Watson's face was crumpled, looking old and bruised. He pressed his knuckles against his eye, fighting for control.

"I will engage another doctor to see to your convalescence." Watson visibly forced out each word. "And I will--I will come to visit you if my courage allows."

"Stop it," Holmes said, his mind swimming in an oily black panic. His injuries pinned him down. "You, you have no need to visit, as you live here."

"Not anymore."

Watson stumbled for the door, and Holmes said his name sharply, so sharp it almost sounded like a cry. Watson hunched against the force of it, and turned with his hand on the knob to give Holmes a look of utter devastation.

"Never again in my life will I love anyone as I love you," Watson told him, and then he was gone.

Just like that: gone.

(break)

NOW

The dream is of gallows and shallow graves. Watson is being buried alive, and then dug up by graverobbers and sold to the medical college. Watson is lying on a metal table, split open from bow to stern, all his wet shivering viscera on display under white lights.

He will be dismantled, Watson knows. The surgically-masked men who huddle over him like vultures will cut out his lungs and heart, flay the skin from his bones. Watson will be portioned out into glass jars, put on display for everyone to see.

He wakes up with a gasp. There is pressure on his chest that he thinks is internal until Gladstone snuffles and wiggles, making his presence known.

Watson opens his eyes, and finds that he is lying on the floor of the hotel room with his dog sprawled on top of him. A dizzying pain in his head and the sour taste in his mouth remind him how much he had to drink last night, and Watson bites back a groan as light lances into his eyes.

Shoveling Gladstone onto the floor, Watson sits up carefully, fingers soft on his temple. He checks his coat pockets and is pleasantly surprised to note that for once he has not been robbed.

"Small graces, Gladstone," Watson says, and the pup snorts in his agreeable manner.

The doctor gains his feet, the room yawing violently for a moment before his head clears. There is dingy sunlight coming through the window and Watson is irrevocably drawn, blinking up at the pale blue sky with something like awe. It feels like it's been years since he's seen it.

"Summer is coming," Watson tells his dog. Engrossed in chewing the leather off Watson's shoes, Gladstone does not answer.

Watson takes the shoes and puts them on a high shelf, far from any canine vandals. He wolfs down a stale piece of bread left over from a night or two ago, and goes downstairs in search of a hot cup of tea and some breakfast for his dog. There is a telegram waiting for him at the front desk of the hotel, and Watson tears it open right there in front of the gerontic clerk hacking through a bad catarrh.

In bold black ink, in shouting capital letters, with unimpeachable formality, Holmes has invited him to tea.

It is entirely unexpected, and an airy startled sound punches out of Watson. The bit of paper trembles momentarily in his hand. Watson goes back upstairs, feeling like he's walking in his sleep. His bad leg is fomenting a minor rebellion, the muscles knotting slowly, and Watson thinks distantly that it must be Sunday.

He sits down in the chair by the window, feeling heavy, and digs out the small wrapped pack of bangers he picked up for Gladstone. The pup dances around, rearing up to prop his forepaws on Watson's legs, panting at the doctor.

"What am I to make of this, boy?" Watson asks, fingering the telegram. Gladstone munches away joyfully, ignorant of every broken heart.

"He means to ensnare me again," Watson says. He bends to scratch between Gladstone's ears, his mind inhabiting another room, halfway across town. "I fear he already has."

Watson sighs. He sets the telegram down and unearths his cigarette case, the movements of his hands swift and unthinking. The sulphurous smell of the struck match invades his skull, and then the richer tobacco takes its place. Watson breathes deep and he is in Afghanistan, smoking crouched in a ditch waiting for the men to come with the stretchers, two dead and mutilated bodies on the ground before him. That scene has come back to Watson at the first inhale of every cigarette he's smoked since; it's become a part of the habit as much as the glazed lightheadedness, the quick energy flickering under his skin.

Immediately upon leaving Baker Street, lo these three months past, Watson had purchased a sack of Holmes's specific blend of Turkish shag, and rolled his own cigarettes with it because he still could not abide smoking a pipe. He had thought of it like a palliative, a way to wean himself off the soul-deep craving he had for his friend's presence, but it had only made the problem worse. The smell of Holmes in Watson's desolate hotel room made it akin to living with a ghost. Watson threw out most of the sack unsmoked, and went back to his own cheaper factory-made brand.

A precarious cylinder of ash has formed at the end of Watson's cigarette, and he lifts it gently to his mouth, trying not to disturb its perfect shape, see how long he can make it grow. In his mind, he can hear Holmes deriding him for playing with his cigarette like a boy just picking up the habit, and Watson imagines blowing smoke rings at him in response, a halo around Holmes's mocking half-smile.

The doctor sighs again. Everything comes back to Holmes; he has re-routed all of Rome's roads.

"It's an insane scheme, as I'm sure you'll agree," Watson says to Gladstone, who is sprawled out on his belly in the patch of sunlight like a flour sack with legs. "I can't understand how his reason led him to such a dubious conclusion."

Out in the street, the day is progressing with a new standard of verve, no doubt owing to the finally clear sky. Carriages rattle, horses snort and stamp with solipedous righteousness, business of all stripes legal and not is being conducted with bonhomie, men gladhanding each other, hats tipped back. Watson scowled at the bustling scene, not appreciating the rosy picture it presented of the world.

"Returning to Baker Street is not an option," Watson states, and ruminates on it, and is flummoxed to find that it is a blatant falsehood. He swallows, closing his hand into a fist. "It--it is an option. Very well. Just as fleeing to Hong Kong is an option, just as all things are possible--fine. It is an option, but I will not take it. He thinks I am scraping along at the edge of existence here, but we're not in such bad shape, are we?"

Gladstone begins to snore. Watson lights another cigarette, his hands alive with trembling.

"My pension is adequate, and soon enough I'll be fit to see patients, and then perhaps a private practise; who can say what will happen? I certainly don't require an allowance. The gall of the man, I mean to say."

Watson trails off. He presses his thumb into the burnt match and comes away with a tiny smear of black char. That dishonest taste lingers on his tongue; he knows better than to trust anything that comes out of his mouth that has been taught to lie so well. There is no one listening to him at all now, human or animal.

Holmes is arguing inside his head, issuing his deductions like proclamations and his requests like demands. That certainty of his, that fundamental presumption that the machinations of his mind would produce the only proper version of truth, it was without a doubt one of Holmes's most invaluable assets, and the one Watson had always coveted beyond reason.

Holmes tells him, you are miserable, and Watson agrees that this is the case. It would be pointless to deny it. Holmes further informs him, you are not miserable when you are in my company, and Watson agrees with that as well, though he is compelled to rebut that he is many, many other things when in his friend's company.

None of the things you are when you are with me are undesirable, Holmes parries, a saucy grin on his envisioned face, and Watson puts a hand over his eyes, breathing out a shaky breath.

"If I return," and Watson is whispering now, keeping secrets, "how long can I possibly resist him?"

He might last a week, perhaps two. Watson can see it all very clearly. He would attempt to maintain a veneer of polite affection but it would crumble. Holmes would smile or pick up his violin or call him 'dear boy' or simply exhale in a particular manner, with a particular tilt to his head, and Watson would be helpless before him once again.

It's a weakness, and one no less damaging than the one for drink that has already taken his father and brother away from him. Watson cannot be expected to withstand such things.

"All right," and his voice still shows no more than a shadow of its strength. "We will take tea with Mister Holmes. And I, I will explain it to him again. I'll make him understand. "

Watson snuffs out his cigarette, the last ringlet of smoke dissipating. He stares out the window at the scrubbed blue world, sunlight catching on metal like tiny starbursts, and thinks that at least it's a lovely day.

(break)

Gladstone seems to recognise Baker Street. He barks coming up the front steps, stubby tail wagging madly. When Mrs Hudson bends down to pet him, he licks her hand like she's family. Watson has the dog's lead wrapped tightly around his palm, casting glances up the seventeen steps to the door of the sitting room and working to screw his courage to the sticking point so he can actually make the climb.

Mrs Hudson tells him that she's already brought Holmes his tea, tells him, "He could use the company," and Watson doesn't want to think about the implications of that.

He carries Gladstone up the stairs because a bulldog's body is not built for mountaineering. Watson's feet feel made out of lead, his doubt suffocating. He always manages to forget how strongly this place affects him until he is within its walls once more.

Rapt under the spell, Watson opens the door of the sitting room without knocking first, but of course Sherlock Holmes does not need such an overt warning to know who has come into his home.

The detective is sitting on the floor in front of Watson's former chair, newspapers strewn around him in haphazard piles. Holmes's hands are dark with smudgy ink, his hair an absolute wreck, still in his dressing gown at four o'clock in the afternoon, and Watson's legs feel watery for a moment, his balance precarious.

Holmes gives him a cordial smile that hangs patently crooked on his face. "Ah, Doctor Watson. So good of you to make it."

Watson finds it difficult to look directly at his friend, and distracts himself with putting Gladstone down on the floor and unhooking his lead. The pup immediately sets to exploring the esoteric junkyard that constitutes Holmes's domain. Watson takes off his hat and pulls the brim between his fingers.

"Thank you for the invitation," he says to Holmes, momentarily grateful for the strictures of British custom.

Inclining his head to the side, Holmes's keen eyes dissect Watson briefly before saying, "Have a seat, my dear man."

Holmes is sitting directly in front of Watson's chair. For some reason it feels unsporting to point this out, and so Watson takes the chair the detective usually favours, with the loose armrest and discoloured China-shaped stain on the seat from a chemical experiment gone awry. The room looks odd at this angle, nothing quite where Watson expects it to be.

"Still with the mongrel, eh?" Holmes says, casting Gladstone a suspicious eye as the dog came sniffing around his newspapers.

"Yes, I find him quite. Companionable."

A knowing smirk twists on Holmes's mouth. "You always did have unorthodox taste in such things."

Watson blinks, and doesn't answer right away. There is something missing from the room, something subtly different from their other recent meetings. The urgency has faded along with Holmes's deathless anger; perhaps it's only lurking under the surface, but Watson will take this strange peace for as long as it lasts.

"I trust you have been well?" Watson asks. Holmes moves one shoulder in a shrug.

"No, not particularly. Dark night of the soul and so forth." An eloquent flick of Holmes's hand dismisses the topic as beneath his interest, and he proceeds, "You have something you wish to tell me."

A minute flinch capsizes Watson's features. He glances at Holmes and Holmes is staring steadily back. There is an unreal quality to the air, the frank and ceaseless awareness of the space between them.

"Yes," Watson manages, because he is not a coward; all else aside, he has never been a coward. When he runs away, it's for much better reasons than fear. "I do not like the manner in which our last few conversations ended. I spoke in anger; I believe we both did."

"Anger?" Holmes expels a tense breath, the edge of his mouth curving cynically. "Is that what you think it was?"

"Please, let me speak. This is. Difficult." Watson swallows hard, one hand clenched on the loose armrest as if it were a weapon. "I need to explain to you why I can't move back in here, and why I, I, I can't see you anymore."

The detective tips his head back and gives Watson a flat look, his eyes splashed with gold from the lamp and appearing almost reptilian. Watson can see the cogs clicking in Holmes's mind; already he's preparing his counterattack.

"It's the last thing I want to do," Watson tells him, broken-voiced. "But I cannot trust myself around you. I own this weakness entirely, and if I can't overcome it then I must remove myself from the temptation."

"That being me?" Holmes asks with a damnable cold smile.

"That being you." Watson looks away. "I wish I could be a friend to you as I once was, but I am not that man any longer. And I apologise. I know you don't--you don't believe me, but I am sorry."

A moment stretches out between them like the shadow of a tree. Watson watches Gladstone investigating the tottering stacks of books that do not fit on the bookshelves. The doctor is in a state of readiness, muscles vibrating as subtly as violin strings.

"You've exceeded yourself, Watson," Holmes says without a jot of humour. "Correct in almost every particular, and yet still blind to the larger picture. "

Watson lifts a hand to cover his eyes, exhaling. "It's easy for you to make sport of me-"

"Yes, it is. However, that's not what I'm doing here, you can be assured." Holmes cracks two knuckles, muffled gunshots. "Would you like me to show you where you've erred?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"You always have a choice," Holmes says sharply, and Watson feels it like ice down the back of his collar. They stare at each other for another long second, and then Watson's eyes jump away, spooked.

"All right," Holmes says, and pops another knuckle. He's nervous, Watson realises, feigning his usual mastery. "You say you will not see me again, but you have demonstrated no ability to stay away."

"I. I have tried-"

"You haven't, really. Oh, I'm sure in the moment each encounter seemed both unique and wholly necessary--you could not afford your bond, you had no way to pay your cab fare, you wished for me to call off the Irregulars--but from an objective standpoint the pattern of your behaviour is clear."

Knowing he will regret it, Watson asks, "What pattern is that?"

"You are bound to me, as I am bound to you," Holmes tells him baldly. "You cannot remove me from your affections, or your thoughts, or your life. You might as well stop trying."

Watson shakes his head, disbelief and a weird creeping hope at war within him. "Your arrogance knows no bounds."

"And that comes as a surprise to you?"

"No, I just-" and Watson stops, slows himself down. Holmes turns him around so easily; Watson knows he needs to be careful here.

"The depth of our regard for each other is the problem," Watson says. "I could not spend every day in your company and still abstain from your bed."

"You haven't been listening to me," Holmes says, his patience as thin and insubstantial as lace. "I have already told you: we will not resurrect that aspect of our relationship. You may not trust yourself, but I invite you to consider the fortitude of my will. I don't make the same mistake twice."

The word falls like a black rock into a pond, and Watson repeats dumbly, "A mistake."

"Yes, Watson, a mistake." A flash of something tightens Holmes's expression, an admixture of sorrow and determination. "It was other things as well, but most certainly a mistake."

Watson looks away, drawn to the painless scene beyond the window, the horses and people and rats all lucent in the sunlight. There is something stuck like a bone in his throat, and he remembers Holmes asleep beside him on a floor in France, tobacco in his hair and firelight on his face, the blankets a storm with the two of them as the eye, the peaceful centre. Watson sets his teeth to the inside of his lip, and forces the memory back down under the surface.

He glances at Holmes. The detective stares back, steady as the horizon.

"I suppose you're right," Watson says softly.

"Of course I'm right. You should know by now never to doubt me, my dear boy."

"I don't." With true effort, Watson meets Holmes's gaze. "I never do."

A ghost of a smile crosses Holmes's face, the slightest lightening of his eyes, and he inclines his head faintly to the side.

"That is only partially true, but I appreciate the sentiment. Now, here," and Holmes rises from the floor, a loose page of newspaper fluttering down in his wake. "I believe you were promised tea."

"Tea?" Watson echoes as if he's never heard the word.

"Likely cold by now, but a soldier doesn't complain, does he?"

Holmes busies himself with pouring them each a cup, his back half-turned to Watson. The doctor watches him, heart-sore and bemused. Gladstone pokes his head from beneath the settee, and comes out to investigate Holmes's ankles. High-stepping around the puppy, Holmes brings Watson his tea and Watson takes it with numb hands, thanking him by rote.

"So," Holmes says, leaning against the window with saucer and cup in hand. "Do you have any other arguments to offer against my proposal?"

"Yes," Watson answers at once, although he is distracted by the astonishing simplicity of drinking tea with Holmes again in this beloved room, crowded with the detritus and debris of the detective's work, skulls and maps and decanters of poison, a fetal shark in a glass jar, a four-fingered monkey paw clenched forever around an invisible branch, each artifact bizarre and possibly dangerous, and Holmes in the middle of it all, the point at which everything else converges. This place has been blown up in Watson's mind until it shines unreachably like El Dorado or Atlantis, and now here he is again.

"Expound upon them, by all means." Holmes cedes the floor, waiting expectantly, almost eagerly.

Watson starts to speak, and then stops, runs a quick internal inventory. There are other reasons; there must be. He has been living alone for the whole of this brutal season, inebriated and ill-used and sick from loneliness, and why, why? What were his reasons?

"I, I won't let you keep my money for me," the doctor says, and it sounds good, plausible and defensible. "And I certainly won't take an allowance."

Holmes crooks the smallest smile, because Watson is speaking in the future tense, even if it is in the negative as well.

"It's your money; of course you may do with it as you please. I merely offered for the sake of your peace of mind."

That is too egregious to let pass, and Watson shoots his erstwhile friend an exasperated look.

"My peace of mind is forfeit the moment I move back in here."

A piece of light jolts through Holmes's eyes, and he sets down his cup and saucer on the windowsill. The high tinkling sound of china clinking is all that betrays Holmes's unsteady hands; his face is as watchful and conniving as always.

"You've never had much use for it, anyway," Holmes tells him.

Watson lifts his eyebrows. "Haven't I?"

"No. Peace of mind is the refuge of uninteresting people."

"And we are certainly not that."

Holmes grins. "Certainly not."

A breath sticks in Watson's lungs as he looks up at Holmes, feeling stilled, the moment becoming momentous. His resistance has eroded and they both know it; no rock is strong enough to withstand the endless crash of the ocean.

"Holmes," Watson says, and his voice breaks. He stops, mortified, and clears his throat. "Tell me why again."

There is no hesitation. "Because we are meant to be together," Holmes says. "Our greatest trials are yet to come, villains and dangers of which we cannot yet conceive, and we shall face them shoulder to shoulder and unafraid. You are going to save my life and I am going to save yours. We are fated for incredible things, you know."

And it's easy then, terrifyingly so. It's the single step off the top of a bridge, the diving joy of the steepest fall. All Watson has to say is, "Yes," and then he watches in quiet amazement as Holmes smiles, and breathes out as if for the first time in years.

(break)

NEXT

Watson will move back into the rooms at Baker Street.

It will take him no more than a single afternoon; all of his belongings will fit inside a steamer trunk and two battered unmatched suitcases that Holmes unearthed for him to use. It will seem almost unbearably odd, standing in the daylight with his whole life boxed up at his feet, Gladstone barking at the horses in the road. Watson will have the feeling that he is setting off on a long journey; he will say goodbye to the clerks and shopkeepers in the defiant tones of a man who does not intend to return.

There will be trouble from the start. Holmes will be superior and cruel and leave the clothes he borrowed from Watson on the floor, crumpled and stained and burned, and Watson will forbid him from entering his room and purchase a brass lock for the door and it will have absolutely no effect. Watson will retaliate in childish ways, putting salt in the sugar cup, hiding Holmes's pipe, letting Gladstone lick the spoon on the detective's dinner tray, and there will be a petty satisfaction in it, a mean smile etched on the doctor's face. Holmes will see most of the tricks coming, but he will say nothing and react with the anticipated surprised irritation, respecting the new friction between them, the way they do not fit in quite the same ways.

But they will still fit. They will eat breakfast in silent fellowship, passing newspapers and sharing toast. They will spend days in a single room, talking and arguing and playing cards, etiolated away from the sun, bereft of company save for each other, and it will not seem stilted or uncomfortable; they will never run short of air to buoy the conversation.

This plain kind of brotherhood will eat at both of them sometimes. Holmes will stand too close, and touch Watson when it is not at all necessary, and Watson will twitch and flinch and look hunted. The vast sea underneath everything that they say to each other will roil and storm, and they will find themselves on edge, fraught with tension, their glances electrically charged. Watson's ears will go red and Holmes's eyes will start to burn.

And then Holmes will remove himself, swiftly and irrevocably, disappearing from the flat for a day or two and leaving Watson to wander their rooms talking to Gladstone and forgetting to eat. The night will be a short cycle of madness: the first few hours obsessively trying to determine where Holmes might have gone, the desperate schemes to find him and shove him against the nearest wall, the wild things that Watson might tell him, the irreplaceable taste of Holmes's mouth under his again, and then anger will set in, and then black depression, and then as the sun rises his frantic temper will subside and he will miss only his dear friend again, and not the man he once loved.

They will never discuss these intervals, and the incidences will grow more and more infrequent as the years pass. Eventually, Watson will barely notice when Holmes touches him. Eventually, Holmes won't mean anything by it at all.

Years will go by. Watson's limp will improve as his injury fades into the past. Holmes will buy him a cane that conceals a sword, and Watson will be absurdly pleased with the gift, and carry it with him everywhere he goes. He will learn to fight with it and it will be like walking without pain again.

Holmes will take cases that are no better than throwing himself in front of a train, and Watson will rescue him, revive him, repair him--whatever is required. Watson will not complain about the peril, the pale shaking ghost of himself that Holmes becomes when suffering from traumatic shock, because in some askew part of his mind Watson feels that he does not have the right; he has damaged Holmes to a greater degree than that to which any petty thug could hope to aspire, and any protests he might make will ring hollow and remain unspoken.

And Holmes will live, every time. Occasionally it will be a matter of inches, of fractured seconds, and Watson will be sick with terror, knowing that nothing has changed and Holmes's death is still only a prelude to his own, but there must be an angel watching over at least one of them because Holmes will come out of each near-fatal experience more alive than before. Both of them will become halfway convinced of the detective's complete invulnerability, but they won't talk about that.

They won't talk about a lot of things. Their life will be kinetic, crowded with action and fondly biting humour and sharp grins traded across violent rooms, and it will be easy to set aside the morose moments that pass between them, the quiet sense of loneliness that sometimes pervades their sitting room even with both of them there. It's only an undercurrent, a low mournful theme played on woodwinds, and as a general rule they will be able to ignore it.

Time will pass and pass and pass. Gladstone will grow grizzled and long-suffering, his puppyish enthusiasm melting into an aggrieved dignity combined with overarching laziness. Scattered flecks of silver will appear in Holmes's beard. Watson will age subtly on the outside, mostly just around the eyes. Mrs Hudson's eldest son will die of malaria on a missionary trip to Africa, and she will wear black for a year, weep in the pantry, and emerge a changed woman, harder and colder and farther away from the world. Their unorthodox patchwork family will thrive in secret, the seventeen steps chipped and worn under their feet. Holmes and Watson will both forget that they are orphans for months at a time.

Their vices will surround them. The allure of falling cards and clicking dice will never fully dim for Watson, and Holmes will have his chequebook after all, locked safely away in the drawer. It will never sit right with Watson, shame churning his stomach every time he sees Holmes writing the rent cheque for both of them, but the doctor will show only deferent gratitude, teeth clenched in the back of his mouth. Watson will understand, at long last, that his life is not what he expected because he is not the man he expected to be, and eventually he will make his peace with it.

Holmes will take up cocaine as a way to kill time and almost end up killing himself. Holmes has always been susceptible to dark patches, spates of misery, and the cocaine will be better than matches in a mineshaft, lighting the way back to the surface. When his heart is running like a rabbit and his hands are shaking so fast they look blurred, Holmes will feel delirious and eagle-eyed and confident, untouchable. The shattered bits of his heart, ever a sad heap in the pit of his stomach, will be shunted aside, forgotten, and he will be a young man again. Watson will never understand what it means to him.

They will argue about that, and about the chaotic state of the sitting room, and the best way to get to Charing Cross, and where to go to dinner. They will argue about whose waistcoat Holmes is wearing, and whether or not the biscuit fed to the now-unconscious Gladstone was tainted. They will argue about small things instead of arguing about big things, and it will prove a winning strategy.

And then it will be a decade later. Victoria will continue to reign, the great clock at Westminster will keep its eternal watch, and across the sky the sun will sweep.

There will be another long rainy spring, and to his immense surprise Watson will fall in love for the second time in his life, and that will be Mary. She will take him entirely off-guard.

Watson will return to Baker Street one night in a daze, his hand still warm from hers, his face still bright with flush from the brief touch of her lips, and he will stammer the news to Holmes, wringing his cane between his hands, "I, I, I mean to marry her, Holmes, I do," and even with the circumstances as they are, the doctor will not be able to keep the foolish grin off his face.

That will hurt Holmes, that grin, that look of desperate joy that he has not seen on his friend's face in ten years, but he will play it off with a sneer and a gibe, and offer no congratulations. He will dedicate the next several months of his life to breaking up the engagement and keeping Watson with him.

It will not work. Nothing will work, and Watson will leave. Holmes will be obliged to watch him go, and to smile while he's doing it. His face will feel permanently deformed from the effort.

After the wedding, Holmes will spend two days drunk in his room above the Punchbowl, dreaming terrible dreams of the past, the immitigable glare of sunlight off the Seine, the suffocating confines of a train compartment. He will awake to see Watson crouched beside his pallet with a weary battered look on his face, his hand in Holmes's hair. Holmes will think he's still dreaming.

Watson will say his name like a plea, his thumb rubbing the smooth plain of Holmes's forehead. Holmes will stare up at him, poled and quiescent with inebriation.

"This is unnecessary," Watson will tell him in a hoarse whisper. "I am not worth this."

Holmes will not laugh at that, but only because he won't have the strength. He will push Watson's hand away, and tell him to go home to his wife. Watson will not listen; he never does the first time.

"Holmes, please, you mustn't take it to heart. It, it's been so long now."

That will be as close as either of them has yet come to mentioning the six short months when they fulfilled every kind of love for each other. Watson will not be able to look at Holmes, his gaze downturned and stuck on the dull gleam of his wedding band. Holmes will watch his friend through blackened eyes, seeing the husband in him, the temperate gentleman. As ever, Holmes will attempt to explain.

"It's a wake, Watson," Holmes will say, and he will reach back for the bottle on the table. "I am drinking to our memory."

Watson's expression will collapse, dismay clouding his features--he will not understand.

"We are not dead," Watson will tell him, a forlorn edge to it.

"Don't be so literal. I am drinking to the men we once were, and to the mistakes of our youth--God bless them, every one."

Stricken, Watson will move to rise, no doubt to run away as he so loves to do, and Holmes will grab his arm, pull the doctor down to sit beside him on the bed. Holmes will snatch the single smudged glass off the table and pour Watson a dram of sour-smelling whiskey.

"Drink with me, old boy," Holmes will say, and his life will hang in the balance with that one request, the whole world holding its breath.

Watson will take the glass, and a wall will come crashing down inside Holmes, and the doctor will tilt his hand, offering a toast. Holmes will tap the neck of the bottle against Watson's glass and say:

"To the first great love of your life."

And Watson will smile, and hide his mouth behind the glass, and murmur just loud enough to be heard, "To you, my dear," and the next toast Holmes makes will be to the future.

THE END