Author's Notes: THIS IS NOT MY OWN WORK. The author is vedma_natka. I saw this fanfic on a Russian SH fanfic site, holmesecret . ru. I really liked it and asked the author for permission to translate and post, which the author kindly granted.
(Previously posted to watsons_woes, great_tales, and sherlockbbc comms on LJ)
Sometimes, it seemed to Dr. Watson that pursuit of the criminals, which drew them into a sequence of strange, surprising, dramatic, or ludicrous events, were invented for the sole purpose of fate, angels, or whoever else was watching him and Sherlock, being able to enjoy watching, with a condescending grin, the adventures of two eccentrics. Sometimes, that grin was clearly defined, and sometimes it would disperse in the air into unseen smiles. And this time, it was as if crystal laughter-flakes danced around John since his very arrival in Cheshire.
At first, the investigation proceeded slowly, but John could feel it in his bones-something was coming. While still on the train, Sherlock, buried in the information search via his smart phone, uttered his customary "Oh." It turned out that the town of Elsmire Port, where they were going, was just then having a major book exhibition, and that fact had to be connected somehow with the theft of several incunabula, which they were currently investigating.
They spent half a day milling around in the festive, wearisomely noisy crowd, but without any result. Not having found anything out, in the evening they headed to a modest hotel, where Sherlock had reserved a room. John stood to the side, watching Sherlock discussing something with the front desk clerk-he was taking far too long, is it possible that he found some clues pertaining to the investigation and they'd have to rush off somewhere? Sherlock pulled out his mobile phone, checked something on it, and John grew practically convinced that his guess was correct. He tensed up, getting ready for a lengthy night marathon. But finally, Sherlock came up to him, spinning the room keys he just got around his finger, and the devils dancing in his eyes would have been the envy of Johnny Depp in his role as the Mad Hatter.
"John, imagine how ludicrous this is! When I was reserving a room, they misunderstood me and reserved a regular double room for us. And now, of course, all the other rooms are occupied because of the book exhibition, so we can't change our room."
A regular double room-that means a room with one double bed. Nice.
"Well, how about a different hotel?" John inquired wearily; he really didn't feel like going somewhere again.
"I already checked-there are only four hotels in this town. And the only rooms that are unoccupied are the deluxe suites, for newlyweds."
Alice kept sinking deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
"You should've taken one of them, then," said John, deliberately serious. "And sent out wedding invitations-some of our acquaintances would be absolutely ecstatic."
When they entered the hotel room, he elbowed Sherlock in his side:
"You are an exceptionally fat fellow and not every bed would be able to accommodate you, but this one will definitely hold us both."
A small sofa stood nearby, but the bed definitely looked more comfortable, and they had to be well-rested for tomorrow. Besides, the bed was large enough for them not to get in each other's way. However, only one large blue blanket covered it.
And anybody who knew Sherlock would have immediately realised who would have to be cold and uncovered until morning, unless the situation were changed. Therefore, the valiant Dr Watson headed on a quest full of difficulties and returned with the spoils-a second blanket.
They settled down, but Morpheus refused to visit them. Sherlock stuck a nicotine patch on his forearm and was thinking about the case. John was trying to get comfortable enough so as to fall asleep after all.
"Lie still," Sherlock advised, "you are not letting yourself fall asleep because of tossing and turning."
"I know," John grumbled in reply.
Sherlock smiled. John sometimes seemed to be too good a man, almost an ideal one, and that is why his little weaknesses endeared him to Sherlock. When he is so grouchy and irritable, he'd be unlikely to be taken up to heaven alive. Thank goodness for that!
"The smile will come unstuck any moment now and will hang in the air..." John drawled, speculatively. "I'd seen Sherlock without a smile, but a smile without Sherlock?"
"Sorry, what?" his friend asked, surprised.
"That was a literary association. Sorry, it just came out." Truly, it wasn't worth it playing such games with Sherlock, but apparently, the day among books influenced John in such a way that he forgot himself.
"What kind of literary association?" Sherlock could be very meticulous sometimes.
"With Carroll's 'Alice.' You didn't need it and must've deleted it from your hard drive," John brushed the question aside. He didn't feel like explaining just then.
"Not at all; I can recall that book. Girls who become smaller, vanishing cats, a ludicrous court case. Brr!" he winced theatrically.
"But why 'brr'? Because you couldn't solve the case and took offense at the author?" John tried to needle his friend.
"Of course not. Simply because it has a Victorian air about it. I cannot stand that era."
Sherlock pronounced the last sentence especially clearly, putting long pauses between words. How fond he is of theatricality.
"That era? The Victorian era? But why?"
A strange fellow, this Sherlock. What a ludicrous reason for disliking the book.
"A terrible time. Electricity was just appearing, those awful gas lights everywhere for lighting. No internet, the most current news are in the newspapers. The fastest way to notify anyone of something urgent is a telegram. To get anywhere, you have to use a horse-drawn cab. How slow everything is there, how one can never get anywhere on time!"
Sherlock was simply indignant at the inconveniences. Indeed, what a sorry existence it is without one's mobile phone and laptop!
"One gets the impression that somebody is forcing you to live in that era."
Sherlock silently pulled the blanket toward him, grabbing the other blanket in the process. John stopped his attempts.
The silence didn't last long.
"John?"
"What?"
"And if I say that I am being forced?" Sherlock's voice was filling with doubt. Should he tell?
"Forced, how?" John said, amazed.
Sherlock decided that since he already started to talk about it, there was no point in trying to hide things.
"For some time now, almost every night, I have dreams in which I am living in that time. I investigate cases in total absence of material foundations. I am crawling around the place of crime on my knees with a measuring tape and a magnifying glass. I draw my conclusions on the basis of samples of cigar ash and the distance between the criminal's footsteps. No investigation of microtraces, no normal chemical lab, no help from the police, and Lestrade is five times stupider and ten times more arrogant than in real life. There's no Anderson though, what a piece of good luck! He would have been an individual whose IQ would've been a negative value."
"Am I present in that world?" John raised himself up on his elbow and looked at the gesticulating Sherlock.
"You are. Hm...and Harry is your brother after all, in those dreams," ah, how Sherlock doesn't like to make mistakes, even insignificant ones.
"No doubt. And have I already gotten married and moved out?" a good way to clarify the chronology. And Sherlock was so unprepared for any knowledge on John's part about the dream-world, that he didn't even perceive the hint immediately.
"Yes, to a Miss Mary Morstan...wait! Have you also been seeing these dreams?" he opened his eyes wide in amazement.
"Not the same ones, but related dreams," John fell silent. It was difficult to resist teasing Sherlock, even a little.
"Tell me!" Sherlock turned over onto his stomach, leaned his chin on his fists, and looked just like a child who is ready to listen to a fascinating fairy tale.
"Naturally. So, I dream that I am a former medical doctor, who left a medical career for writing. In those dreams, my name is Arthur. I-who-is-Arthur like to write different genres. Fantasy and mysticism among them, but most of all I consider myself an author of historical novels. One time I wrote a tale about a retired army doctor, who was looking to share the rent and moved in with Sherlock Holmes as a fellow lodger. This Sherlock Holmes was first introduced to the readers as a chemist, but then he turned out to be a detective."
"These were not serious writings, and I didn't want to become interested in the series, but the readers liked the characters, and the editors were simply twisting my arms, convincing me to write a sequel. I no longer wanted to write about these two and tried to hint that I wouldn't by demanding exorbitant honorariums. The editor refused to take the hints, he only sighed and turned his pockets inside out, just so as I would give him more Holmes. And more. And more. Oh how they pestered me!" John's voice rises in pitch. It seems that the usually calm doctor was pestered quite thoroughly.
But Sherlock wanted details, and he clarified,
"How?"
"Dreadfully. I decided to get rid of Holmes. Naturally, without Holmes, Watson couldn't investigate any cases: I wrote him as a somewhat thick fellow."
"Yeah, Watson's stupidity is a trifle wearisome. 'My dear Holmes, but how?'" imitated Sherlock. "Compared to him, you are an absolute geinus."
"Yeah, right!" John snorted incredulously, although he was flattered.
Sherlock turned over onto his back once more. The bed shook, and John thought about the fact that even such a large bed was uncomfortable to share with Sherlock. Good thing this was just for one night.
"And what happened next? Were you able to get rid of Holmes?" Sherlock attempted to sound indifferent. He almost succeeded.
"Hm. Well, actually, I killed him... Moriarty and he fell into a waterfall. Very romantic. The public sobbed," John felt awkward telling Sherlock about the murder of Holmes. About his murder.
"I haven't seen that particular dream yet," the detective said grimly. "And how much time did the kind author allot to us?"
"Ten years after our first meeting," John remembered the amount precisely. It was too painful a topic to forget easily.
"We still have time," Sherlock steepled his hands and raised them up to his face.
"Don't worry. For us...I mean, for them, for those Holmes and Watson, all ended well."
"How's that?"
"The public was quite upset and didn't want to accept Holmes' death. They nearly had demonstrations with placards near my house, and Queen Victoria personally wrote me a letter...I revived him. I wrote a story, in which, as it turned out, he didn't fall into the waterfall but played a trick on everyone and went into hiding for three years. He even tricked me, the jerk that he was! Do you know how I-who-is-Watson suffered?" John sharply turned towards Sherlock, practically hanging over him. "Do you realise what it had cost me?"
"It wasn't me!" Sherlock reminded him, but John didn't seem to have heard.
He started to shake his friend by the shoulders:
"Three years! For three damn years, I was sure you had perished!"
"John! That was the Holmes from your dreams! Not me!"
Sherlock did not protest; surprise and...admiration? appeared in the depths of his pale grey eyes. John decided that he was imagining things, but just in case moved away a bit.
"I know! But just you try! Just you try to pull such a stunt-I will find you myself and kill you. With my very own hands. No, I shan't wait till you decide to come visit Baker Street, won't faint when you do, either!" Acrimony now took place of indignation. Indeed, one would have difficulty imagining the army surgeon Watson, who has seen his share of horrors in this life, both in Afghanistan and in his own native England, fainting away.
"I understand...I understand! Calm down!" Sherlock cautiously patted his friend's shoulder. He wasn't sure but he thought that this gesture is supposed to relieve anxiety. It wouldn't work on him, but John is different. And, indeed, it worked; his friend's tone changed from aggressive to guilty:
"Agreed, yeah?"
"Yes, John, I won't deceive you by pretending to be dead. I promise," he sincerely believed in what he was saying.
"Thank you. So Holmes and Watson from the stories are still living, and it looks like they will continue to live for a long time yet..."
"I gave unforgivably little attention to those dreams, but now we'll have to sort them out. What they mean for us..." the unfinished phrase just hung in the air, the detective's thoughts flew somewhere far away.
"No doubt. Sherlock, I used to think, before, that these dreams are literary versions of our adventures, which are asking to be written. To be written by me. But it seems that this is something else."
"So it seems. Have you any ideas?"
John shrugged his shoulders.
"The only thing that comes to mind is resonance with parallel worlds. Somewhere there, Sherlock and John were born a century earlier. And in a third place, Arthur, the alter ego of me and that Watson, did not find his Sherlock and started writing instead. We met, they met, Arthur invented and described the meeting-echoes. The dreams are his echoes. Something like that."
"A wonderful idea," Sherlock was delighted, "elegant and feasible. The only question is what we should do about it."
"I don't know."
"You're the genius here, you should decide," hung between them, unsaid.
"We should perform a comparative analysis of our dreams. Compare them to reality. Perhaps after that, we'd be able to draw conclusions from our doubles' mistakes. For instance, as you did with the imagined death of that Holmes," Sherlock was trying his best to distance from the image with which he merged in his dreams. Now he only called him "that Holmes".
"How mercenary you are!" marveled John.
"Practical," corrected Sherlock.
And he started questioning his friend, in between clarifying the details, till morning. At dawn, John finally could take no more and threatened to escape to the bathroom with his pillow and blanket, thus snatching a couple hours of sleep.
Sherlock was hoping to obtain new material for analysing after he slept. To sleep not just for sleeping but for an actual purpose was tempting. But the dreams cheated him: he dreamed about total nonsense. After he woke up, Sherlock wanted to discuss it with John, but his friend was still asleep. Sherlock got up and sharply pulled apart the heavy drapes in hopes that that would wake up Watson. The sun over the water grinned like a Cheshire cat through the tree branches. Sherlock smiled at the new day...and decided not to trouble John-let him rest. He'll ask later.
"By any chance, did you have any dreams about dragons, gnomes, or strange creatures named hobbits?" he inquired, as soon as John opened his eyes.
John yawned ad shook his head.
"No, why?"
"I was dreaming that I was the dragon named Smaug, and you were the hobbit named Bilbo. And you tried to steal my treasure... Rather pathetic and silly efforts. I am curious as to what all that could have meant?"
"Sherlock, forget it. Sometimes, there are simply dreams without any deeper meaning."
The end (Or is it?)