Title: Siren – Live your own life
By: Endgegner07
Summary: After the falls, Holmes ponders his actions and whether he lives his own life any more.
Disclaimer: It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that I don't own the very same.
A/N: First story (well, a short one) after a long time. Unbetaed and please keep in mind that English isn't my first language though I did my best to elimitate errors.
Live your own life, for you will die your own death.
An ancient latin proverb.
Live your own life. I like to imagine that I live my own life. But do I really? Brilliant consulting detective, thinking machine. No regard for the softer emotions, if one reads Watson's stories published in The Strand.
Live your own life. I live, certainly, my heart pounds a rapid beat, the blood flows through my veins. Red and hot. Or rather red and cold as ice, if my friend's descriptions hold any truth. But is it blood that flows through my veins?
Or is it some other liquid, something else that ensnares the mind, provides illusional peace?
Sometimes I think it lives my life for me. That clear liquid, calling with a siren's voice, promising to take all difficulties, all feelings that are unwelcome away, make them bearable. It is so easy to heed its call. And so I do. A thought spared to the consequences of this act, the guilt at obeying the siren, all taken away the next instant.
Do I fear living my own life so that I chose it to live it for me? Were I to search my heart (and I like to believe I do possess one...) I have to estimate that it has come to just that. Honesty can be the bane and blessing of ones existance. Ah, an idiom worthy of Watson's elegant way with words. Once that I am honest with myself I have to give him credit at least in the privacy of my own mind, for he has certainly aided my and later our little business with his eloquent stories. For eloquent they must be if the broad public is to read them. And read them they did and do and they will continue to read them, if Watson will write more after the events taken place at the falls.
From latin proverbs, to 'vices', to Watson's stories of my, our, cases.
No more. For I am death. I effectively died at the falls. I believed it to be my last case, the greatest one of all. The heigh of my carreer, the last act, so to speak.
But I didn't die.
Live your life, for you will die your own death.
I did not die my own death. In a way, I imagine I can say that the professor died two deaths when he plunged into the falls. I expected to die that day, to make that greatest of sacrifices, to see England, London, Watson safe from harm. Oh the irony.I survived and crawled out of the abyss. Moran was there, that much I did know. And Watson wasn't, for I wouldn't endanger him, wouldn't let him be there at what should have been my last action upon this earth.
I wonder if not maybe it, the thing that might have lived my life for me in the darker aspects of it, was the cause of my sudden bout of self-preservation. That maybe itcompelled me to live on, to fight for my live while trying to end the one of the professor. It is difficult to express the workings of a mind like mine, coiled, calculating, complicated. I envy Watson his gift, his ability to express himself at times.
I can read other people, I can deduce their very thoughts but when it comes to me, to my thoughts, I have trouble explaining them, even to myself. I never try to explain them, my innermost thoughts, to anyone else. Not even when I owe it to some when I dearly owe it so someone...
Either way I lived and let Watson suffer in the believe of my demise. Why? I do not know if I can yet answer that question. It may be cowardice (it very likely is because, as I said, honesty is a bane and a blessing...), the fear of his reaction... to let him believe I died, even for a short period of time.
At the falls I didn't dare call out because of Moran and now I fear his reaction, the reaction of my one true friend in the face of my deception.
I would tell him later when I was safe, there would still be time. The fear aroused the siren and I heeded its call. And in the false security it provided me, telling my friend became so much less important for it would spare me the anguish to see his pain.
And now? I don't live my own life. I live the life of a Norwegian called Sigerson.
What of my death? I didn't die my own death. Will I die the death of the Norwegian called Sigerson? I don't know. Again, the irony of all of it. Me, not knowing.
But then again am I still me? Am I the person that vowed to let no harm befall my dearest, my only friend? Maybe one day I will make sense of it, of my actions, my thoughts and faults and be able to explain them to the only one that will be able to understand. To explain them to the only one that still matters. Until then I will pray to whatever deity will deign to listen that Watson will have the mercy to do the same when that time comes.
And mabye then will I live my own life and die my own death, without sirens and vices and deceptions.
I hope that it may be so.
SH, 14th May, 1891
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