Title: An Act of Contrition
Author: garonne
Characters: Holmes and Watson (gen)
Warnings: None
Notes: This was my Homestice2012 fic for alone_dreaming. Many thanks to two very helpful people: eanor for alpha-reading and Loki's Campaign Manager for beta-reading.
.. .. ..
South of England, 1914
Watson was relieved to see the last of my monstrous goatee, as was I. He was already eating breakfast in the hotel dining room when I came downstairs, an Englishman once more and the character of Altamont cast off forever.
"I see you've rejoined the ranks of respectable citizens," he said with a grin as I sat down opposite him.
I ran my hand over my chin, clean-shaven for the first time in two years. "It is pleasant to feel civilised again, I admit," I said, reaching for the tea-pot.
It occurs to me that, were Watson the one writing this, he would no doubt attribute some pithy epigram or other to me at this point: a few clever phrases about identity and appearance, perhaps, and the wisdom of being comfortable in one's own skin. He is quite the philosopher, although he has always given me all the credit in his stories. Of course he does also have the benefit of unlimited time in which to formulate his phrases. I should like to see the man who could come up with such witty aphorisms on the spot.
I do not mean to suggest, however, that the portrayal of my character would be wholly inaccurate, were Watson the author of this piece. Indeed that is precisely the heart of the problem I am trying to address.
I was oblivious to the existence of any such problem on that morning in 1914. Indeed, I was in high spirits.
"I see age has not withered you, nor custom diminished your hearty appetite," I said as Watson loaded his plate once more with toast and bacon.
He glanced up, his face feigning umbrage though his eyes brimmed with mirth. "I'm not surprised to see age hasn't given you one."
"I shall eat in London," I said. "We should leave as soon as we possibly can."
It was the morning after my defeat of von Bork, and we had stayed in a small hotel on the outskirts of Harwich. I planned to waste no time in driving back down to London, where a select group of persons in the War Office was waiting anxiously for my report. I had a great deal to say not only on the subject of von Bork, but also arising from my years in America as Altamont.
I began to muse about where I would take rooms in London. We had won a small victory against von Bork, but the greater battle was yet to come, and I had a feeling it would be several years before I would be allowed to return to my bees on the South Downs.
"Where are you living in London now?" I asked.
"Is that why you didn't know where a letter or telegram might find me?" he said.
It seemed a most peculiar thing to say. Was it my imagination or was there something challenging in his tone? I know now how obtuse I was being, of course, but at the time I had no idea to what letter or telegram he could possibly be referring.
"You mean, because I didn't know your address?" I said slowly. "I do remember you live on New Cavendish Street, of course. I merely thought you might have moved at some point over the past two years."
He did not answer at once, but rather dropped his gaze to the toast he was buttering. I took the opportunity to study him. Since I had last seen him he had lost his last strands of blond, and his hair was now completely grey - or a distinguished silver, as he might have said politely of one of his characters. His fingers betrayed the amount of work he had been doing recently. One did not get that particular pattern of calluses from sitting at home, enjoying one's retirement. Whilst waiting for him to speak, I tried to determine how many months it had been since he began to practice medicine again.
Finally he sighed. "Never mind."
There was something in his eyes I could not quite fathom. I did not like it, for I had always been able to read my Watson like a book.
"I still have rather spacious rooms in Marylebone," he added. "I can easily put you up, if you like."
"Capital." I drained my teacup. "Will you drive, or shall I?"
He chuckled, breaking the tension I had felt between us. "I think I had better. We drive on the left here, if you remember."
On the drive down, however, he was strangely silent, and I was reminded once more of that unfathomable look in his eye. It bothered me.
.. .. ..
In London, I was not surprised to discover -
L'Aisne, Picardie, 1916
"What do you have there, Jean-Baptiste?"
He tried to hide the letter - or rather the story - he'd been reading, but his poor rheumatic hands were not as quick as they used to be. Eugenie snatched the pages and envelope from his hand. She could not read English, but her face darkened when she saw the stamp on the envelope.
"It's that poor soldier's. You opened his letter!"
They both turned to look at the Englishman who lay stretched out on the sofa in the corner of their small sitting room. Night was falling and they could only half see him in the darkness. Eugenie crossed the room to check the man's condition, while her husband hurried to hang the blackout curtains and light the candle, bustling about to hide his embarrassment.
"I grew a bit curious while I was waiting, that's all," he said uncomfortably. "And it's not exactly a letter anyway. More like a strange sort of story."
Eugenie had been outside to fetch water from the well, and now she sat down and wiped mud from the soldier's face. Apart from his broken arm he was not seriously injured, only stunned, frail and weary. He looked old - too old to be a soldier, almost. They had found him lying in the ditch behind the house that evening, and brought him inside, half-carrying and half-dragging him, as well as two people in their eighties could.
He was not the first soldier they had found, although he was the first who was still alive. The front line had been inching back and forth for the past few months, a mere two miles from their village. The only neighbours they still had were those old enough to cling to fond memories and familiar places more than their tired lives.
Jean-Baptiste picked up the envelope again. It bore a black-ink stamp in English attesting to its passage through the censor's hands and it was addressed to a Dr J.H. Watson. He wondered whether it was the same man who was featured in the story the envelope contained. He also wondered why the envelope had been unopened. Had the man simply not had time to do so? Or had he been reluctant to hear from his correspondent?
"He's a doctor," he said, looking at the name on the envelope once more.
"He needs a doctor." She stood up, and drew a blanket over the man. "Tomorrow morning you will walk as far as the Lemaitres and get their girl to go to the English."
She sat down beside Jean-Baptiste, who was looking at the other papers that had been folded up with the man's letter. She threw him a reproachful look, but was distracted by the photograph he held in his hands.
"That must be his wife," she said, peering at the gentle, innocent young face by the light of the guttering candle. "Poor dear, with her man far away in France."
The photograph was worn and faded, though, and must have been several decades old.
"I think he was left a widower many years ago." Jean-Baptiste looked through the few papers again. "Without having any children."
"All the better," said Eugenie, glancing at the portraits of their son and grandson on the mantlepiece, both missing in Flanders.
Jean-Baptiste said nothing.
Later that night, after the doctor was settled in the spare bed and Eugene had dozed off in her chair, Jean-Baptiste lit another candle and sat down beside it. He unfolded the peculiar letter, and plunged into the story once more.
.. .. ..
I was not surprised to discover that Watson had been back in practice for almost half a year. A large-scale effort was in place to bring doctors out of retirement and distribute them evenly across the country, freeing up their younger colleagues for the coming fight.
London was on edge. The newspaper headlines in the streets were filled with ominous rumours from Europe. Mycroft, on the few occasions I ran into him at the War Office, looked tired and stretched thin, and never stopped to talk.
Watson worked long hours, but I worked even longer. When I returned home I usually found him dozing by the fire, a newspaper slipping from his knees and his tea growing cold beside him. He would wake at the sound of my entry and rub sleep from his eyes.
We would talk in a desultory fashion before eating and turning in for the night. Sometimes Watson seemed strangely closed to me. I never ventured any remarks about my work and he never inquired. Things had changed since our days in Baker Street: Watson and his trusty revolver were little use to me now that my work consisted mostly of decoding and information processing. It pains me now to think of Watson reading that line, but at the time, I did not give a second thought to what he would feel were I to express the sentiment.
One night I came home with a box of cigars bestowed on me at a Ministry function by a greasy, overly familiar politician, despite my protestations. Watson accepted one with delight.
"I find that I appreciate small pleasures more and more," he said, catching the box of matches I tossed him. "And this is certainly a pleasure."
"A small recompense for my having spent the day among men who talk too much."
He grinned. "That has always been an unforgivable fault in your book."
"Indeed. Give me a man with the gift of silence any day. The rule is not the same when it comes to criminals, of course - on how many occasions has someone betrayed himself through the careless utterance of one imprudent word?"
We fell to chatting of old cases that had been solved in such circumstances, and passed from there to other adventures and other fond memories. Watson never retains the same details of each case as I do, and the comparison is often amusing. That evening we both laughed without restraint, dredging up from the depths of our memories the most absurd and diverting cases we had ever encountered.
"That is one tale that shall never be made public," he said with a sigh, rubbing tears of laughter from his eyes, after we had just spent a good half an hour reliving the peculiar affair of the Bishop of Stoke-on-Trent and the mahogany watch-winder.
"The world will be a poorer place for not hearing the story," I said. "However, for the sake of the dignity of the clergy..."
"The Bishop almost rivalled my good self in dull-wittedness, it's true," Watson said with a grin.
"Your fictional self, you mean to say."
"You are too kind, Holmes."
I gave him a stern look. "You are extrapolating a compliment where none was intended."
He grinned. "I'll take what I can get."
I sat back in my chair and blew a smoke ring into the air between us. "The Honourable Member had good taste, at least. It has been some time since I last enjoyed a cigar that much."
Watson leant forward to pick up the box. "An Indonesian blend."
"In Chicago they favour the Cuban variety," I commented. "I never really warmed to it despite two years' exposure."
To my surprise the laughter vanished abruptly from Watson's face. He turned away to stub out his cigar in the ashtray, his face hidden from me.
The witticism I had been about to utter died on my lips.
After a few minutes' desultory conversation, Watson got to his feet, stifling an unconvincing yawn.
"I think I'll turn in now. Good night, Holmes."
Over the next few days the newspapers filled with bad news from Mons and Tannenburg. I spent a week surviving on an hour's sleep a night and living in my office, surrounded by piles of half-decrypted codes and classified documents on everything from troop movements in the Balkans to North Sea meteorological reports.
When I finally returned to New Cavendish Street, I found Watson just sitting down to dinner, his own eyes rimmed with shadows.
"Join me, Holmes," he said firmly. "I'm in no doubt as to how badly you must have been treating yourself this week."
I sat down opposite him, grimacing at the large helping of vegetables he was loading onto my plate. "I saw von Burk today," I said. "His final interrogation before being exchanged with a notable prisoner of our own."
Watson suddenly set the plate down hard on the table. A splash of gravy slopped onto the tablecloth, but he ignored it. He seemed to be restraining himself from speaking.
After a few moments he looked up. "I should quite like to have been there, you know, Holmes," he said in a voice that was deceptively mild.
I had not even thought of it, though it was true that in the past I should certainly have invited him along for the closure of a case. Always loath to admit to failure, I replied more coldly than I should have:
"I don't see what purpose that would have served."
He put down the serving spoon and folded his hands on the table in front of him. He looked quite calm, but I, who knew him so well, knew that something was boiling under the surface.
"Now that you no longer need my trusty revolver, I am no longer any use at all, I suppose?"
This was so close to what I had indeed been thinking that I was hard put not to show my guilt. He saw me flinch and his lips folded into a thin line. How could I make him understand that one part of my brain could coldly and logically discard him as useless, while another part knew he was so much more than the sum of his uses? As soon as I uttered the first half of the sentence, my cause would be lost.
Watson said quietly, "What am I to you? In the past, if you remember, I have described myself as nothing more than a convenient sounding board, but I was not entirely serious. Now it seems I'm not even that."
I said nothing.
He went on, almost wistfully. "I kept thinking you would mellow over the years, but it seems I was a little optimistic. You know, I've grown rather tired of being 'good old Watson' - of being taken for granted, one might almost say."
I found myself unable to respond. Everything Watson said was perfectly reasonable, and yet I burned to refute it. It seemed he was missing the most important fact of all. What did it matter what he was to me, precisely? He was Watson! Yet I found myself unable to articulate what exactly I meant by that, and Watson's gaze was pinning me down.
"I regret not informing you about von Burk," I said carefully.
"Blast von Burk! I don't give a damn about that anyway." He took a deep breath, and continued in a quieter tone, "I could forgive you almost anything, you know, Holmes. But disappearing as though you were dead again - ! Not even a letter or a telegram to tell me where you were."
I was overcome by a sudden comprehension of the heart of the matter, and of my own heartlessness.
Watson went on, in the same quiet tone, "It was only a few months ago that Mycroft finally told me you'd been undercover for two years. And then turning up and expecting me to be just as you had left me - "
He broke off, and met my gaze. The anger in his eyes was at odds with the calm of his voice. I returned his gaze, but try as I might, the necessary words of apology did not rise to my lips.
After a few moments he seemed to give up waiting. He pulled his plate towards him and began to eat mechanically. He did not look at me or address another word to me for the remainder of the meal.
Within a few days, I learnt - through Mycroft - that Watson had signed up for active service. I did not expect them to accept him, but he was only seven years over the age of conscription for doctors, who were in short supply. It seems they took him with open arms.
Our farewells were brief and awkward, and over before I had time to reflect.
Now that Watson is gone, I find the evenings are long and empty, in a way they never were in Chicago. My mind begins to run on tracks it should probably have taken many years ago, as I turn well-honed skills of dispassionate analysis to my treatment of Watson.
Watson has always been a highly unreliable narrator, of course. I smile when I think how often he has changed dates and places and embellished events to suit his narrative convenience and the exigencies of discretion. I have always been impressed by his humility in exaggerating his own stupidity for the sake of the story - although I am sure I myself am not as arrogant as he portrays me.
His depiction of my cold, detached character, however, has always been cruelly accurate. I wish I could tell him now that it was all just a disguise, which I could throw off like Altamont or Escott or any of my other characters. But no, the Holmes that Watson knows is the real Holmes. Fool that I am, to have needed three decades to appreciate Watson's acceptance of the fact - and to understand that his forbearance was not inexhaustible.
Of course I could have no more changed who I was at any point during our years together, than I can now that I have grown old and inflexible. What Watson asked of me was so very much less than that that I am ashamed to think of it. It never even occurred to me how he must have felt, reliving once more those years where I was dead. I maintain that the first time I left him in the dark was necessary. The second was rather less so. I cannot promise to change; I can only acknowledge the fault.
The middle of a war is a rather unfortunate time for such regrets, I realise. I merely hope I have not come to my senses at too late an hour.
.. .. ..
Jean-Baptiste was distracted from his thoughts by a squadron of aeroplanes roaring overhead. Eugenie woke with a start. She frowned when she saw the candle being wasted, but said nothing. She bent over the Englishman to check him, and then came to sit down beside Jean-Baptiste.
"Finished reading your story?" she said, not hiding the disapproval in her tone.
Jean-Baptiste nodded absently, still absorbed in his thoughts.
"It's an apology," he said finally. "Written in a most peculiar roundabout way."
"Must be written by a peculiar person," said Eugenie.
The doctor's eyes fluttered open.
Jean-Baptiste went to fetch some water, thinking that there was some hope in the world after all.
The next morning the doctor was sitting holding his letter in his good hand, looking thoughtful. He had fashioned himself a sling from his own supplies. When Jean-Baptiste entered the room the man put the letter down, and with his good hand offered him a cigarette.
"They are coming to get you with a truck," Jean-Baptiste said in English.
The doctor nodded. "Thank you."
"Maybe they will send you home, no? That'll be nice."
"I don't know. I hope so, for there's someone I'd rather like to see again." The doctor sat looking at his letter for a moment. "I wonder if I could trouble you for a sheet of paper? I have a rather urgent letter to write."
.. .. ..
Fin
.. .. ..
A couple more notes: The age of conscription was in fact four years higher for doctors than for everyone else. (Only from 1918 onward, but who's counting...) Anyone who is familiar with the minute details of His Last Bow will have noticed that I've treated them in a pretty cavalier fashion too. But after all, Watson contradicts himself so often I don't feel bad about doing the same ;)