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When Sherlock Holmes truly concentrated, the world fell by, peeled away in degrees until nothing but the comfort of method and reason remained, nothing but pure spirit and its occupation, unclouded by trivialities of everyday.
So it was that when a knock sounded on the door of the sitting room he shared with currently absent Doctor Watson, he raised his head and registered with mild surprise that the day had tipped towards the evening, and the room was shrouded in gloom.
“Yes?”
The door opened to reveal Mrs. Hudson, a crumpled up handkerchief mulled in a nervous hand. “Inspector Lestrade, Mr. Holmes.”
If Mrs. Hudson appeared distraught, Lestrade was wearing an expression Holmes was sure the inspector thought to be neutral; it wasn’t doing a very good job.
He was out of his seat in an instant. The Watson-shaped hole in the room, always prominent but until a moment ago benign, took on a looming quality.
“What is it,” he barked, barely stopping himself a polite half-step away from Lestrade.
Lestrade, to his credit, didn’t back up. “There was an explosion in Green Street, Mr. Holmes,” he said solemnly, keeping his eyes firmly on the detective’s face. In the ringing silence of the room, Mrs. Hudson’s breath hitched.
Holmes gripped a chair back, the lacquered wood distantly sticky under his fingers. Why he should notice that now- “Dr. Watson,” barked again, as if he couldn’t quite keep the name in his mouth.
Lestrade thought that the mercurial eyes in front of him had gone cold and narrow like those of a snake. “The good doctor had sustained some light wounds from the shrapnel. He had stayed on in Saint Bart’s to help with the wounded. As you can imagine, Mr. Holmes, they find his expertise quite invaluable at a time like this.”
“Yes.” The intensity of the detective’s eyes dimmed a fraction, and he turned his head away. The rigid line of his shoulders, shrouded incongruously in the severe tailoring of his morning coat, eased a little. “And I imagine you want my expertise-”
“-with the explosion itself, yes.”
“Quite so. If you would give me a moment.” He needed to change, and he needed – no, he quite distinctly didn’t need a moment to gather his thoughts, because they would have gathered around the words Doctor Watson and explosion and light wounds, and he would have a hard time shepherding them away. Groping for anything else to occupy him, he noticed Lestrade was looking a touch rumpled; the Londoner’s pallor of his face had settled into an unseemly grey. There was a smattering of dark droplets up the right sleeve of his overcoat.
“Sit down, inspector,” he instructed impatiently. “If we could trouble you for a cup of tea, Mrs. Hudson,” he remembered to soften his tone, and she nodded, eyes a bit glassy, and left the room. Lestrade opened his mouth, perhaps on a refusal, and then closed it.
Good.
The cab ride through London was accomplished in workmanlike mood. The tea had steadied the inspector, and he relayed the facts of the case, such as they were. Such as they were was frustratingly scarce; at the busy thoroughfare of Green street where a certain Dr. Watson happened to keep his practice, an explosion went off in the busy hours of the afternoon to devastating effects. Almost a dozen dead and scores of wounded, their numbers exacerbated by stampeding carriage horses and general panic, to speak nothing of the animals that have themselves been killed, and of property damage.
The scene itself could serve a less inventive writer for a pandemonium. The dark night hid none of its jarring chaos. Instead the lamps burning on every corner turned it into an operatic depiction of hell; the yellow gas light and blazing sodium made grotesque shadow of broken masonry and dead animals that littered a street corner. The rain that had started to fall furthered the atmosphere of despair and washed away both blood and evidence. The wounded had been carried off, but the dead still haunted the place of their demise, lined on the pavement and shrouded in white sheets.
Holmes attempted to work among the chaos of the press and passerby and the overwhelmed attempts of the police, and then gave it up as a bad job and hailed a cab to Baker Street.
---
When Holmes came down in the early hours of the morning, the figure of Doctor Watson was silhouetted in the window, so motionless the detective had almost missed him there.
Watson stood with his right hand in the pocket of his trousers and his left arm raised, forearm pressed against the windowpane and supporting his forehead. His fist was tightly balled and his eyes were closed.
Holmes stopped himself two paces from him and looked. The doctor was jacketless; he forced himself to dismiss the sight of the shirt fabric ripped and liberally stained with blood high on his right arm. In light of all else, it was immaterial right now. Watson hadn’t rolled his cuffs back down. There was a defeated slump to the powerful line of his shoulders, a deep notch in the corner of his pinched mouth. The crow’s feet by his closed eye looked almost like scars, chiselled deep into the very bone. He must have spent the night treating the wounded.
Holmes took the last two steps, deliberately loudly, and laid a hand on his shoulder. When that produced no effect in the statue-like figure in the window, he slid his palm up and gripped the back of the doctor’s neck.
Watson shifted, finally acknowledging his presence. His body angled slightly Holmes’s way, while the head turned away; the clear tension between the desire for comfort and shame at showing any sign of weakness, bone-deep in the steadfast ex-soldier, yanked hard at Holmes’s close-guarded heart.
“Come away, my good man,” he murmured, knowing praise to on occasion do wonders; Watson unglued himself from the window and wiped roughly at his eyes, but let himself be guided towards his favourite armchair, where he sagged into the cushions and gripped the fingers of his right hand with his left, as if hoping to steady the fine tremor running through them. His eyes were far away, but not so far Holmes would feel no hope about calling them back to himself.
He knelt on the carpet by the doctor’s carelessly spread knees. “Have you been seen to?”
“Yes.” The voice was rough – overuse, Holmes noted – but the distant eyes sharpened a little. Watson’s left hand fluttered towards his torn sleeve. “Sutured, cleaned and checked again this morning. Draining a little.”
Bricking off the relief that was threatening to swamp his mind, Holmes let himself grip the doctor’s hands when they settled again. “I need to ask a few questions, I’m afraid.”
By the time he had gotten to the crime scene yesterday, not only was it dark and drizzling, but the street was also still littered with the grisly aftermath of violence and sharp reminders of human fragility. He had made frustratingly little headway, and only succeeded in getting heartsick.
Watson nodded. He freed his hand and ran it over his face. There were dark flakes caught in the grooves in his skin, as if he hadn’t quite managed to scrub them out.
Holmes steeled himself for the question and gentled the tone he knew could easily sound too harsh with impatience. “Have you any idea what caused the explosion?”
The fingers, which had previously returned to the detective’s grip, jerked. “Yes.” Watson hunched his shoulders forward; if before he had been listless and distant, now his very being sharpened with tension. The fog cleared from his eyes. “Yes, Holmes, I know exactly what had caused the explosion. It was a grenade.”
Holmes didn’t quite keep his surprise from opening his face. “Are you certain? Shock-”
Shock could do much to confuse the memory of a mind that had been through it before. If Watson had seen an explosion up close, it was only natural his mind had connected it to similar happenings in his past. Of which there might have been more than Holmes was comfortable thinking about; he had never asked. Watson’s soldierly past, although as naturally a part of him as his limp or his quiet courage, was none the less the proverbial foreign country to the detective.
“Yes-” there was a distinct note of impatience in the doctor’s tone now, “I know shock, and I know a grenade explosion. I’ve seen more than my fair share of both, Holmes.” His voice was firm enough, but the tremor in his fingers wouldn’t still. It was starting to worry the detective; he had never really known the doctor’s hands to shake.
“My last client didn’t show, so I left the office at quarter past four. I was just out the door and turning left when it went off in the throng of people on the corner.” Dispassionate as the sentence started, it didn’t end that way; Watson jerked one hand from the detective’s grasp and swiped it loosely past his own temple. Only now did Holmes notice a smattering of shallow cuts that littered the side of his face and ear, the flakes of dried blood that must have survived a washing.
“The blast knocked me off my feet. I can’t tell you quite what I did then-” the doctor’s eyes had turned distant again, glassy as he tried to recall what the memory must have shrouded in merciful mist. “There were too many wounded, Holmes – I suppose I must have kept hold of my medical bag – ”
His breath was coming in stuttering, choked gasps now; sweat stood in beads on his forehead. Holmes had read about battle stress before, had even discussed its appearance in soldiers with Watson, but he had never witnessed it. He felt a vicious and unaccustomed sense of uselessness. He was well aware of the irony of the fact that the man who knew what to do was succumbing to the very malady, and he loathed it.
His own heart picked up speed in sympathetic response. He had heard of men that had hyperventilated themselves into unconsciousness; while he had heard opinion that it was best to let the seizure run its course, he found he couldn’t stomach the thought.
“Watson,” he gripped one flailing wrist again, “John, what do I do? Show me what to do.”
An aborted gesture of the doctor’s free hand none the less managed to convey a sense of come closer. He shuffled intently forward until he knelt between the other man’s knees, and Watson’s hand scrambled over his shirt and pressed, scalding, to his breast.
He started uncomprehending for a minute into the close face, and then he noticed the doctor’s lips moving, forming words, no – counting. Heartbeat or breaths, it downed on him. Watson was using the cadence of his breathing, of his blood, to calm himself; he covered the hand on his chest with his own, clawed his fingers between the other man’s and gripped as hard as he dared. It was firm in his hand, comfortingly real, solid-boned; he concentrated on breathing in an exaggerated, slow rhythm.
Not daring to speak, merely telegraphing each breath, Holmes was beset by the realisation that he had never been this keenly aware of the physicality of another human being. Observant by nature and analytical by habit, he knew much about Watson; knew the twitches of his moustache as they telegraphed annoyance or amusement, knew how much the other man could drink before he turned maudlin, knew the weather that worsened the lingering pain in his leg. And yet he had never been this unflinchingly confronted with the steadfast yet fragile living flesh of him, the desperately delicate web of sinew and nerve that made a man.
Watson calmed by degrees; slowly his breathing steadied and deepened and his shoulders curled inward, as if under an enormous weight, until at last his forehead came to rest on Holmes’s collar bone and his back rose and fell on a long rhythm of inhale and exhale. He hadn’t let go of Holmes’s hand.
Holmes let out a long breath of his own, suddenly aware of deep tiredness. His throat was tight, and when he raised his free hand, his fingers were shaking. He rested his palm on the back of Watson’s bowed neck.
There were words being muttered into the fabric of his dressing gown, and as the doctor’s voice regained its timbre, he recognised a litany of surprisingly inventive cursing, culminating in a heartfelt exclamation of “what a useless man!”
Preoccupied with his own thoughts, he hadn’t realised at first that the words were meant in self-abuse; when the awareness sharpened around him, he gripped the tendons under his hand. “Don’t talk nonsense,” he said sharply. “There must be a dozen or so men and women at Saint Bart’s this morning that owe their limbs to you.” While he was certain that was not the limit of one Doctor Watson’s contribution to the Creation, he also knew the man would do better for some specific example of having made the world a better place. “Not to mention,” he lowered his voice, half turning his cheek into the short-cropped hair on Watson’s nape, “how my own life should look today, had you been standing closer to the blast than you had.”
The hand in his squeezed, the strength of it more reassuring than Holmes had realised he might need. Watson lifted his head off his shoulder. His eyes were rimmed in red, but quite present; there was no trace of glassiness in them. They stared at each other for an interminable moment.
“The sentiment is dearly reciprocated, my friend,” Watson said quietly at last.
“I know.” Holmes wasn’t sure how his smile came out. He rarely cared to know, but just this time he would have liked to. He stood up slowly, and Watson’s hands fell away from him. The doctor yawned. Now that the tension had run through him and out, he was weary to the bone. “I am afraid you won’t get much useful out of me,” he said, a little bashful. “I don’t suppose either of us feels up to a repeated performance.”
“No, of course not.” It was clear Watson was embarrassed, and while the detective found the notion preposterous, he understood where it came from, and wasn’t sure how to fight it.
A touch at loss as to what to do, he turned to the drinks cabinet to give him an illusion of privacy. An ear he kept alertly out suggested Watson had shuffled from the armchair to the settee; a quiet grunt – a known signifier of the bad leg being elevated after a long stint of careless use – suggested he might have stretched out.
That was good; while Watson generally slept well, as soldiers were prone to, Holmes found he would have felt strangely bereft, should the man retire to his room to lick his physical and spiritual wounds in peace. He expected the embarrassing compulsion to keep the doctor in his sights to pass with time, but he was well aware that the happenings of the past twelve hours had left him a touch tender-hearted, where his companion was concerned.
When he turned, Watson indeed lay on the settee, face turned towards Holmes and eyes closed. The slow rise and fall of his chest suggested sleep, a deep, exhausted slumber. One hand hung limp off the narrow surface, sure fingers curled inward and lax.
Perhaps he hadn’t meant to drop off, but drop off he had, and quite thoroughly.
Holmes stepped carefully closer, keeping his step light on the carpet. When the doctor didn’t stir, he bent over him and gently untied the spotted tie the other man still wore. The knot had gone a touch askew in a minute betrayal of the difficulties of the night. The collar stud was next. Holmes’s fingers, skilled in lockpicking, barely brushed the doctor’s throat. The watch chain with its precious cargo, then, all laid with care on a nearby table.
On the back of one of the chairs rested a folded Afghan, a faithful steward of many a solitary night. Holmes shook it out and laid it carefully over the sleeping man. Watson stirred a little and pressed his cheek into the upholstering, brow furrowing.
When he had risen, Holmes had meant to go out. To see his crime scene in daylight, to set a few streams of investigation into motion. Now, he found himself hesitant. The call of mystery was uncharacteristically quiet in his mind. Instead, the sight of Watson’s eyes glassy with delayed shock, the tremor in his ever-steady hand rolled in the forefront of his spirit, disquieting.
There was a thing or two he could find out from this very room, and Lestrade would no doubt appear shortly to pester him with whatever the police had turned out from the city’s gutters. The world could not stop – but for once it could wait. There was no guessing how many lives Doctor Watson had wrestled the Death for last night; he deserved his rest.
Holmes settled into Watson’s empty armchair, propped his feet by the doctor’s on the settee, and let his eyes fall closed.