chapter one: days
"So, where would you like to start?"
She set the tray on the lock room table and carried a glass of water and a bowl of tomato soup over to his desk next to the study fireplace, where he was supposedly sorting through the stacks of papers accumulated over the last week. She didn't think much sorting was going on, but the piles were neater, and there was space for her to set the dishes down in front of him. Not that he appreciated it.
"What is this?"
"Still missing those faculties, huh?" She returned to the table and started on her own bowl of soup.
"I'm not hungry, and you're not my personal valet no matter what was said in the past, and I'm trying to work."
"You may be making a valiant effort, but I'm here to tell you you're failing miserably. You've been pushing those same files back and forth across the desk all day. You're still barely sleeping. I doubt you can remember the last time you ate, and you're dehydrated. If you don't take more liquids, at least, you'll end up back in the hospital for real this time."
He grumbled something she couldn't identify but picked up the glass and drank the contents in one long draft. She returned to his desk with the pitcher from the tray and refilled his glass. "At least two more of those." She set the pitcher down on one of the stacks to his left.
"Don't— I don't want any water damage," and he reached across awkwardly to move the pitcher with his good arm and set it on the floor. "If I kick this over, you'll have to mop it up."
"Don't kick it over then."
After a moment of starting irritably at the computer screen he began eating the soup. She took a few more spoonfuls herself and tried to work out what she wanted to say. In a minute he was going to complain about her not-saying whatever it was she wasn't saying and she felt defensive enough already. She finished her own water and watched as he drank half of his second glass. When he didn't take up his spoon again, she began.
"Listen. It doesn't have to be me, and it doesn't have to be Alfredo, but you need to talk about what happened with somebody." He didn't turn around but he hunched his shoulders higher against her words and said nothing. "The trigger didn't disappear when they took Moriarty into custody. Honestly, you were just as shell-shocked in that hospital as she pretended to be, and that was before all hell broke loose. You said learning the truth gave you clarity, but seems to me it was a pretty brutal lesson."
"No. Discussing this is indulgence. None of it was real. I've moved on." He spoke to the computer screen, dark now from a screen saver, and in the reflection his eyes were shadowed, his face without affect.
"Yeah. It may be indulgence to dwell on blame and guilt, or to try to fathom why Moriarty is the way she is, but your experience was real. All of it, starting in London. Regardless of who she was or who she was trying to be, who you were then was not some game of make-believe."
He turned his head slightly to talk to her across his bad shoulder. "A game is exactly what I was to her. A curiosity, a diversion, an experiment. And when I was no longer sufficiently diverting, she set me on the track and watched me propel myself into the abyss so she could get on with her plans. And then she came back and tried to do it again." She could see the strain in his jaw, and his right hand came over to rub the part of his arm where the edge of the sling cut in above his elbow.
"Okay, yes. She manipulated you. But I'm not talking about her deception; I'm talking about your feelings." He made a disparaging sound. "Here's another way to look at it: the other person in a relationship is always ultimately unknowable. We can try, but short of employing those You Can Learn Telepathy techniques, we can't ever truly know the other. There are always layers, some conscious, some not. That the Irene you knew was more consciously constructed than most—"
"Ha!"
"—doesn't invalidate the Sherlock who loved her."
He shook his head, unwilling to concede. "I should have known when she asked me about the last year and a half." She sighed, frustrated. It was wallowing, but if he didn't let it out, it would fester. At least he was letting it out.
"At the time, I assumed it was an effect of the mind control, her not being clear what year it was, and I couldn't bring myself to correct her by pointing out how much longer it had been. Besides, I was more focused on not telling her what I'd done after she died. Now I wonder if it was a test, to see if I had any suspicions about her story. Or a means to tighten the leash of guilt, because of course she knew very well what I'd done—" he breath caught, and he looked down and adjusted the sling some more. "A year and a half, that was actually months ago, right in the middle of your contract."
"I know. The week we met Alfredo, right?"
He shifted his chair around and looked at her, surprised.
"I can do the math. 'One year, 6 months, 22 days' you said," and he nodded, remembering that night, feeling more shame and the fading echo of that vengeance-fueled rage. It would be so easy to rekindle it, for another kind of vengeance. She was frowning now, observing him. He unclenched his teeth and let out a long breath. No. Not again.
Her anxiety subsided as she watched him deliberately relax his features, and she went on. "So. Three weeks before that. And that's when we met Alfredo. We were working on that office bomb case. That poor guy in the wall."
"Not that 'poor'; he was a blackmailer. I don't mean he deserved to end up like that. But I don't sympathize with him particularly."
She tilted her head in acknowledgment. "I"m sorry for his wife, at least." She sighed again. "That feels like a long time ago."
"It does, and that's why her question should have been a warning." She turned back to her bowl and swallowed more soup along with her exasperation with his continued self-recriminations. "You were right, then, too." He turned back toward the desk, carefully touching the stack of papers he'd been shuffling.
"You said you didn't know if I was dreading the day you'd leave or counting the seconds, and that captured my dilemma handily. I couldn't imagine moving forward either way. I wanted to stop time, tread water a while longer. And maybe I'd eventually be too tired and give up, and be free from the effort and tedium of the never-ending laps."
She sat up taller at that. "Are you telling me you were suicidal?"
"No. No, just exhausted from fighting it all. Grief. Staying sober. You. Myself." He stood up suddenly and wobbled, a little light-headed. He listed slightly as he slowly made his way over to sink down on the library couch, wincing as his shoulder hit the cushions. "I don't know. I felt it again, for a moment in the hospital, with her. She asked me if I'd rather she had had me killed back then. Before it all started, when she first contracted Gotlieb. And I said yes." He looked down, abashed. "You know. You heard the recording. I'm sorry."
She had heard it and wasn't surprised by his answer to Moriarty's question but it had still made her heart skip a beat, that he should be brought so low. There was no doubt in her mind he had meant it, and the idea that she might not have had the experience of these past months— She'd pressed her palm to her breastbone then, in the hospital, as she listened to the conversation through the speakers in the other room, and she recalled that pressure again, now, and tried not to let it show in her face as she got up to sit in the chair by the fireplace, across from him. "Sorry for what?"
"I meant, it was exhaustion speaking. Because if I hadn't been manipulated by her, if she hadn't, or made me think— and if I hadn't broken then, you, and this—" He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. You're so tired, she thought. Just let it go. He kept his eyes closed as he continued, "And by feeling, even for a moment, that I would have been better off— I was giving up on this, our partnership. I won't ever do that, Watson. Not ever." She heard the echo of his insistence in the bathroom that no harm would come to her and shook her head again, smiling a little this time. His eyes were still closed.
She laughed at him, gently. "You really need to stop making promises you have no means to keep, although I appreciate the sentiment." He frowned, whether at her correction or her reference to sentiment, she didn't know. "Truly, I do. But it's okay. It's okay to be too tired to hold on. Besides, if you did let go it wouldn't matter. Because I didn't. We're never both going to let go at the same time; that's what partnership is. You can rest now. It's all right."
She was momentarily surprised when he responded literally, nudging off his shoes, sliding sideways to lift his feet up, and easing back on his right side to stretch out on the couch. He stuffed a pillow behind his back as a buffer for his shoulder and raised his right forearm up over his eyes, and she went to the window to close the shutters to the bright afternoon light. By the time she turned back, his arm had slipped down and he was out.
She returned to the chair and let her own eyes close. The dim room felt peaceful for the first time in a long while, street noises muffled and the relentless pressures of the past week gone. Well, fading, in any case. Gone was a long way off.
The night it all came apart, he'd been sitting in this same chair when she finally returned to the brownstone with her questions about the psychological warfare waged against him and new resolve to proceed with the investigation despite an absent partner. He had sounded so happy to see her, so changed from the somber shell he had been since Irene that she was immediately suspicious.
"Sherlock! Why are you here? What happened?" There were signs of a struggle by the stairs and a dark smear on the wall. He was alone in the library, no sign that anyone had kept company with him there. Her suspicion solidified into certainty. "Where's Irene?" she asked, her voice hard and cold.
"No longer with us." He laughed harshly then, switching to an exclamation of pain as he curled forward, hand on his shoulder. "I'll tell you everything, but first there's a little matter of a bullet I could use your help with."
She was at his side, pushing his hand away and carefully raising the towel to examine what was underneath before she realized she'd moved. "What the hell— Did Irene— We need to get you to a hospital."
"There's no time for hospitals; I need you to deal with it."
"What happened?" she repeated as she gently bent him forward so she could examine the rest of his back to see the extent of the damage and bleeding. "How long have you been sitting here? This looks to be at least a few hours old. What did Irene do? Something's not right with the story we've been told."
"My dear Watson, you have no idea. Or maybe you do; after this evening I shouldn't presume to know anything at all."
*.*.*
Being in shock for at least a few hours by the time she arrived had made him giddy and voluble by turns, and he kept darting his head around as if expecting a third person in the room with them. When she finally got the story out of him, she realized her hands had been acting of their own accord, cutting away his vest and shirt, sponging off the blood, assessing and preparing to extract the bullet and stitch him up. By the time she looked, really looked and saw her gloved hands tipped with blood and armed with forceps and needle she thought she might be in shock herself.
It was as if she were watching herself work on his back from across the room. She froze for a second and then deliberately retreated, letting her detached consciousness observe from afar as the best means to get things done. It was a kind of acclimation therapy, she supposed, first the autopsy and now this. Low-risk surgical procedures, work her way back—
"This is stupid. You should be in the hospital right now," she said, hoping the tremor wasn't audible in her voice.
*.*.*
She woke abruptly, startled by something she couldn't identify. She groaned as she sat up, her neck painfully stiff from the awkward angle she'd slipped into, still in the chair. The blanket from the couch had been draped over her, and she was alone in the room. It was dark outside, the only light from the table lamp in the lock room. She checked her phone for the time: 3am; she'd slept for over ten hours. She hoped he'd gotten half as much. She heard the sound again, the squawk of the ancient bathroom faucet being turned off, and a few moments later he came down the stairs carrying the pitcher.
"You should be resting," she said.
"You doctors and your contradictory orders. I was refilling my pitcher. You were snoring so beautifully, I didn't want to wake you to ask you to do it."
"I wasn't snoring."
"Did I tell you my newest security camera records audio?" He sat down at the lock table and poured a glass of water, saluting her with it before drinking it down.
She stood up and stretched, arms up overhead and then down to hug her calves before joining him at the table. He pulled the cup she used in the bathroom out of the top of his sling and set it down for her.
"Handy, that," she said, hearing the pun as she said it, and shook her head. "Sorry."
"Have some water, Watson," he said, and he filled her cup to the brim.