Pairing: None/Bromance
Rating and Warnings: Angst. T for mentions of (canon) drug abuse.
Disclaimer: Arthur Conan Doyle created these characters. Though that was so long ago that they are now, as far as I understand, public domain.
A/N: I've wanted to do something about the last lines of "Sign of Four" for a long time, and when my other stories were killing me I wrote this in one evening. I guess it's more of a character-study than anything else.
Deserter
"'The division seems rather unfair,' I remarked. 'You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?'
'For me,' said Sherlock Holmes, 'there still remains the cocaine-bottle.' And he stretched his long white hand up for it."
The lines you see above is how I have ended my retelling of the story I chose to call "The Sign of Four". I imagine it will seem a strange kind of ending to the readers of the Strand, but when, writing the story down, I had reached those same lines, I must confess I simply could not go on. I sit in my room now, reading them once more, and once more they give me pause.
"And he stretched his long white hand up for it."
He did, I remember it clearly. With my mind's eye I witness it again: Holmes stretched out like a cat in his armchair, slouching gradually as he began to come down from the heightened state of mind he is in during a case. I can hear his voice, so calm and final – "For me, there still remains the cocaine-bottle" – and as I hear this echo of the words they seem to grow, their meaning increasing, their depth opening up into a bottomless abyss, and I fear I have missed something very important indeed. There was something else in his tone that evening, something sour. I look back at my notes and at the text I have written. Apart from the usual ennui my friend displays when a case has been solved and he has already had the pleasure of making the scales fall from the eyes of us mortal men, this more unusual tone had entered my friend's voice upon finding out about my engagement, and had crept into his reply: "I feared as much. I really can't congratulate you."
Of course, his aversion to marriage, and indeed any emotional relationship, have been well known to me for some time, and it should not have surprised me that he was reluctant to celebrate my announcement. Still, as I read these words too for a second time, something does not sit right with me. Holmes has no great love for the fair sex, that much is true, but, by the same measure as the one by which he judges men, he has a great deal of respect for the clever ones – a number to which he himself admitted that my Mary belongs. Moreover, he has often congratulated me on things he himself feels are frivolous and unimportant, but which he knows to be important to me. Both these facts make his reply all the more obscure. I cannot help but to connect his words about the cocaine bottle to his words about my impending marriage, and I shiver as if the room has gotten colder.
I feel like a cad all of a sudden, and I confess I am not entirely sure why. My friend is a great man. While he has, to my great joy and honour, enjoyed my company, and while my writings might initially have helped to increase the number of clients who found their way to his door, I am surely not so conceited as to believe I play any vital part in his life? To believe that it was the prospect of my leaving, and not simply his ordinary ennui, that made him reach for that wretched bottle?
There are other things, however, coming back to me at this very moment, which seem to tell me that it is indeed so. I remember that the first time I was engaged in one of his cases, and indeed most of the times after that, it has been he who has asked that I be present, not I. While his mind solved the cases, my gun has at a handful of times been the means by which he lived to reveal his solution. And when he will forfeit eating during a case or a cocaine-haze, I often have an even stronger sense of being the one who keeps him alive; he, too, has a good aim, a firearm, and a bodily strength greater than mine, more capable of defending himself against the miscreants he seeks to bring to justice, but who will defend him against his own demons? Who will take up battle with the forces that drive him endlessly back and forth between all-consuming work and drug-induced lethargy? All too easily I can imagine him wasting away slowly, becoming skin and bones as he works tirelessly on his cases, and then, when his body is no longer strong enough to recover from it, he will still inject his treasured poison under his skin. The numbness he seeks would turn into a sleep, then unconsciousness, and then, while I lie in my marital bed, he would drift out of the world one night, never to return to it – or to me.
"And he stretched his long white hand up for it."
The sentence seems to glare at me from the paper where I have written it down. The more I look at it, the more it seems to be an accusation of a terrible crime, of negligence and stupidity, aimed at me. It tells me that perhaps John Watson is indeed the only sad, wing clipped excuse of an angel standing between the great Sherlock Holmes and a most undignified death.
The day after tomorrow, I am to be married. I know Holmes will not come to the wedding. I have asked him once, and begging seemed neither dignified nor likely to change his mind. It is becoming clear to me that I have unwittingly committed a betrayal, and that if I should desire to amend it, I would have to commit one equally despicable.
I imagine his funeral. His brother, otherwise such an invisible man, would surely leave his club for the occasion. A number of the officers from Scotland Yard would be there, some to give their thanks, some to reassure themselves that he was dead. Mrs Hudson would be there, inconsolable, and so would I. That would be the circle of people seeing him off to his final rest. All the while, around this country in cottages and country houses, castles and sheds, people who owed their money, their freedom, or their lives to Holmes would be having their tea in blissful ignorance of the great man's death. The greatest man. The best and most wonderful man I have ever known.
"And he stretched his long white hand up for it."
I stretch my own hand out for the inkwell, and raise my pen over a new sheet of paper which must become message of my desertion to either my beloved friend or my beloved fiancée.