Disclaimer: Public domain, but I didn't invent them.
A/N: Challenge response on the holmesslash list. My first fic in this fandom.
A confused impression of wall and bushes suddenly giving way to sky and sea; a sensation of falling; somewhere, the sound of a horse's death scream, a crash, and then a terrible silence.
I picked myself up from where I had, miraculously, fallen, pitched out of the plummeting cart and onto the hard dirt road. My leg hurt abominably; there was a ringing in my ears that told of concussion, and the palms of my hands were raw and dirty. I paid none of it any heed.
I was alone on the road. The horse, the cart, had gone over the edge, crashing down what must be several hundred yards on this part of the coastal road.
"Holmes!" I screamed.
He had been next to me when the bolting horse went over the edge. I fancied I could still feel the warmth of his thigh where it had been close to mine during most of our ride. But while I had been thrown clear to land on the road, he must have gone over.
Gone.
The realization felled me. I sank back onto the ground, limp, and then I curled up where I lay, forced into a foetal position by a pain of loss so intense that my mind could not contain it.
I do not know how long I remained there like this, though it could not have been more than a few seconds. Only seconds, but during the eternity as which they appeared to me, I felt myself being sucked into a dark vortex of the blackest despair that would be my life without him.
I groaned aloud with the agony of it. Even the coastal gale seemed to howl with it. Tears streaming down my face, I fancied I could hear the wind calling my name.
Then I recognized his voice.
I was next to the edge before I had even considered moving. There, some eight feet below the edge, Holmes clung to the branches of a small conifer, legs dangling free but holding on as tenaciously as the hardy vegetation clung to the cliff face.
"Watson," he gasped, "do something!"
I looked around wildly. There was nothing I could use as a rope. "Can you pull yourself up?" I called down over the gale.
"If I could, I certainly should have done so by now," he grunted with an undertone of irritation mixed with pain in his voice. "But I'm afraid my left arm is out of its socket."
My mind furnished me with the implications of that calm sentence even as I saw his white hands begin to lose their grip, and I knew that he was going to fall.
He knew it, too, but as always he refused to give up. "Quick, man, if you love me!" I shall never forget the expression in his eyes as he stared up at me, forceful and uncompromising, bidding me to perform a miracle.
Commanded thus, I obeyed, like I had always done.
I struggled out of my clothes until I was naked save for my underthings; not for reasons of modesty, but because I deemed them too fragile. Then I tied the most careful knots I had ever tied - trouser leg and coat sleeve and a double shirt for extra length. Eight feet. Praying hard, I lay down on my stomach near the edge and threw down one end of the impromptu rope until the shirt fluttered in the wind next to Holmes's right hand - the only one he could use, and with a scream that was half rage and half defiance, he let go of the tree, and grabbed, and then I pulled him up.
We clung to each other, and in my relief, I kissed him, and in the aftermath of his mortal fear, he kissed me back.
I set his shoulder, and then we walked the ten miles left of that stage of our journey, hardly speaking a word. But when we reached the Inn, we embarked on another journey entirely, without once leaving our room.