The Personal Blog of Dr. John H. Watson

The Adventure of King Peter

Early this morning, I was eating, and Sherlock was pouting. Seriously. It's as though the man never grew up. He was upset because in the course of his "research," he had all but destroyed our flat. Yes, he does that a lot, but for once it was so bad we had to spend the night somewhere else while it aired out. Luckily, every person in London seems to owe Sherlock a favor, so we stayed at a place owned by a Mr. Plummer. Apparently Sherlock helped him in some case about a disappearing cabby or something. Anyway, Mr. Plummer owns a block of old row houses that he converted into flats, so he let us stay in one of them overnight. We had to leave early in the morning, though, so he could show the flat to some prospective tenants. Hence, the early morning, and hence, Sherlock pouting.

I was minding my own business, eating breakfast, when suddenly I noticed Sherlock had gotten that look he does when he finds a new case. He was staring out the window at two workmen. Only, according to Sherlock, they weren't workmen- "obviously" not, apparently. Then he ran outside. Of course. I never get to finish any meals when Sherlock is around.

When we reached the garden, I saw two perfectly ordinary British workmen standing there with shovels, but, of course, that's not what Sherlock saw. What really surprised me, though, was when he started muttering "Dead, Scottish, dead, dead, dead, Scottish again, fictional..." I've heard some pretty weird deductions from Sherlock, but never have his deductions involved dead Scottish fictional things. Still, that's life as usual with Sherlock Holmes: another day, another symptom of madness.

Then, Sherlock said "High King Peter and King Edmund of Narnia, I presume." Seriously. I thought he'd finally gone truly mad, but then the workmen (or not-workmen, actually) asked how he knew. Sherlock did his usual explaining thing and said that he could deduce that they were English, brothers, and kings, and that he heard one of them call the other "Ed" before I caught up with him. He then considered every king named something with "Ed" that he could think of (19 of them, apparently) and eliminated all the dead and Scottish ones. All that was left was a fictional one, but according to Sherlock "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true."

So now I was sure that Sherlock's crazy experiments had finally done something to my brain, because here was The Chronicles of Narnia live in front of me. I don't even remember the books very well, even though I know I read them all at some point. Still, Sherlock seems to remember them, which is surprising considering he doesn't know whether or not the Earth orbits the Sun.

Sherlock helped Peter and Edmund figure out where some rings that they only touched with gloves were buried, and they dug the rings up and took them away. By that time, we had to leave so Mr. Plummer could have his flat back, but I was still surprised when Sherlock let Peter and Edmund go without doing tests on them or something. I mean, he just saw fictional characters and he's Sherlock Holmes, he wants to understand everything. Still, he seems to know more than he's saying.

I'll never put this one on my blog. Ella would probably think I was having a breakdown, some side effect of PTSD or something. But I want to write it down, because it seems so strange that I don't know if I'll believe it myself later if I don't have a record of it.

It just makes me think about how maybe I'm a fictional character too. Maybe we all are: Sherlock and Mycroft and Lestrade and everyone else. Weird.

Anyway, I'm off to re-read Narnia, and Sherlock is back to being bored.