"I just wanted to let you know that I was thinking of you."
He couldn't help but be wary of the box Watson dropped on his desk even as he assumed she did not subscribe to or even imagine the arcane interpretation of gifts he had grown up with. In his family, gifts were booby traps, set to detonate in strategic psychological focal points. To teach a lesson. Gifts were instruments of correction or coercion or control. What one acquired for oneself, one deserved. The implication being that everything he'd received as a child was therefore undeserved. Unpaid debt that could never be repaid, forgotten, or forgiven.
Just as unnerving was her declaration that she had been thinking of him. He was desperate to know — he was of course always desperate to know — and apprehensive of being disappointed, of having been a disappointment.
She'd already given him what he wanted: a project, an anchor, something to turn to when other investigations dried up (there was always something else he could teach her). A connection to the world that did not pull him in ways he did not want to go. Well, most of the time.
He wondered. Did she recognize as gifts the many things he offered because he was thinking about her? That is, of course, what he might impart to her next for her training and how best to present that information or skill. The history lessons and the methodological conflicts and the tricks to identifying bullets from their bullet holes or time of year from insect larvae carcasses?
Did she expect anything else? He was aware that there were a wide variety of gift economies, from potlatch and moka and dana to engagement rings and dowries and other trappings of the marriage industry to the commercial Hallmark-holiday machine. People who measured the strength and polarity of relationships according to the monetary value of presents exchanged. That was not Watson.
Not that an expression of "thinking of you" required association with any particular day, although this gift to him did. He didn't even know when her birthday was. Or at least he would have to resort to self-hypnosis to access the date his eyes would have captured from her driver's license the last time he grabbed her wallet to pay for pizza, and he didn't have the time for that. He could mark the year that they'd known each other. That anniversary was still six months off, however, and Moriarty loomed, and perhaps it would be best not to make plans too far ahead.
This was unnecessary. He did not want to give Watson some arbitrary thing, and he did not need to, and she did not expect it. Her bedroom was still almost entirely bare: clearly objects were not important to her. That she chose to express herself to him in this way did not mean he had to as well. This was a ridiculous amount of mental effort applied to a trivial and irrelevant question. Also, he was stalling. He lifted the box to his lap and cautiously pulled the ends of the ribbon tied around it as if he were disarming a bomb or untangling an ensnared songbird.
What he found inside was simultaneously simple and profound, a few plain words, almost clichéd in their familiarity. The presentation and provenance were unremarkable, erasing any burden of reciprocation, but the message was clear and steady and cut to the heart of the matter. The heart of him. Like Watson herself.
*.*.*
He was on the roof later that week making observations about the unlikely situation that had arisen after he placed the Osmia avosetta in a hive box that either hadn't been quite as free of other occupants as he'd thought or had some means of ingress he hadn't noted. His initial experiment was simply to find out whether O. avosetta would make a nest out of petals left in the box rather than ones it collected directly from flowers itself, but now he had a much more complicated experiment to monitor. This led to thinking about access and escape strategies and eventually the realization that he hadn't practiced getting out of his straitjacket since before Hemdale.
He tried to recall where he'd stored the jacket; probably in the hall closet where Watson had found his violin. The violin had been one of the few gifts from his parents where the message had backfired, becoming a source of joy and creativity they never would have understood. He'd paid to have "S. Holmes" engraved on it himself, reclaiming it from them as his own, a gift from him to him.
The abbreviated binomial nomenclature on the violin reminded him he'd need to choose a name for the bees if they survived. It would be a week or two before he'd know whether they were viable; time enough to draft a paper about them and contemplate a name. E. holmesii would be the predictable choice, but he hated being predictable. He no more wanted to stamp his name on a new life form than he wanted to create new life forms himself; given his feelings about his family, immortality through genetics held no appeal. Still, it was an opportunity to make a statement or commemorate— Ah, yes. At the very least, she was unlikely to have another just like it.
*.*.*
Her reaction was the best present he'd ever received.