Prompt ficlet: I Believe In Sherlock Holmes.
Two weeks. Two. Weeks.
Fourteen days…too long a life without Sherlock Holmes.
John Watson is walking down Baker Street, exactly what his therapist has told him not to do. She has told him that he should stay away from the street, the flat, the memories held in the snowflakes gently drifting down…but no, John Watson has never been one to follow orders when he doesn't think he needs to.
Everything is the same, and everything is so drastically different…pieces of Sherlock Holmes are shoved into every street corner, affixed to each overhead light, not yet lit though darkness is rapidly approaching. There's the cafe, the hat shop, the door to the flat…
John clutches the key he still wears around his neck, though he has not lived in 221B Baker Street for some time. The metal digs into his skin, cold and harsh.
He cannot yet see the door to 221B; it is obscured by the falling darkness, the angle of the cars parked on the street…but he is walking towards it, and maybe this time he will go inside…? He has tried before, but has never been able to do it, for fear of opening to door to a strain of violin music echoing across the afterlife, and that would drive him really and truly mad.
The people on the street do not notice John Hamish Watson as he trudges down Baker Street, coat collar turned up against the wind, and they don't bother to stop at watch his reaction to the door of 221B. They have their own lives. They do not care.
But John reaches the door, and then he stops, rubs his eyes, because this can't be real.
The door of 221B has been graffitied, painted over with thousands of scribbles in paint, Sharpie, and some that even look like well-weathered pencil. Each one says the same thing, the same iteration of the same words over and over and over…
We believe in Sherlock Holmes.
I believe in S.H.
J.S. and R.B. were here and believe in Sherlock Holmes.
"'Scuse me, mister," says a small boy, cherry turnover staining the corner of his mouth, pushing past John to get at the door. "Lemme through, yeah? Give everyone their turn."
John steps aside, astonished, as the boy shoves his tongue between his teeth and uncaps a ballpoint pen, immediately beginning to scratch his own repetition of the letters that so many others have written: "I believe," he writes in clumsy handwriting, "in Sherlock Holmes."
"Your turn, sir," the boy says, giving him a wide smile as he continues on down Baker Street.
"I haven't got a…" John falters, words sticking in his throat.
"Here," the boy flips over his shoulder, tossing the pen. It clatters to the sidewalk outside the cafe, and John kneels on the packed snow to pick it up, admiring the cheap biro.
"Leaving your mark, then?" a passing woman says, grinning at John. "I did mine last week, see, look." And she points at a signature in loopy handwriting. "Go on, then, write it up. Just like the others."
And John does. He takes the pen in hand, removing one of his gloves and hovering above the wood of the door, hesitating for only a second.
John Watson believes in Sherlock Holmes, he writes, and then he smiles.