Empathy
"In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength."
—Ovid, Metamorphoses
Sherlock Holmes didn't speak. He stood in the doorway of the modest home, first only smelling, then slowly opening his eyes to take in the scene around him. He clutched his pocket magnifier in his right hand, but it occupied none of his thoughts. Instead, he was completely encompassed within and without by the mind of Will Graham—that is, the mind as it was expressed by the man's home.
He smelled the distinct odor of canine and saw spare, neat furnishings and felt himself filled with calming colors—so calm, in fact, that a person of a phlegmatic disposition might have found them drab.
But Will Graham did not have a placid disposition. That was the irony of it. His house would have been perfectly ordinary—not that anything, Sherlock knew, was ever really ordinary. It might have been like hundreds of homes belonging to unmarried men, except for the details. The lures, painful in their intricate simplicity. The achingly symmetrical arrangement of every object.
Will was in the details, and they were painful. As he proceeded throughout the house, Holmes felt his internal state change, until he could feel the agony of a mind covered in empathy so thick it threatened to choke his very life away. If he'd tried, he could have given a hundred different reasons why he knew what it was like to be Will Graham—observations, facts, details. But those deductions united and became a single impression, the feeling of another man's mind. He had no idea how much like Will Graham he was.
John Watson watched his friend, knowing better than to speak and disturb the rapid rhythm of inward thought. He might not lay claim to the title of detective, but he wasn't without perception. Graham's house reminded him of his flat, the tiny, miserable place he'd occupied before Stamford's rescue.
The two spaces looked nothing alike. Watson was orderly, but not pathologically so. Graham's lures and boat parts indicated a temperament suited to the sort of detail work John despised. The furnishings were nothing like his had been, either.
But there was something. Watson couldn't have cited a single objective fact to support a comparison. He only knew that when he walked through Will Graham's house, a wave of emotion washed over him, so akin to the one he'd felt in the old days that it might have been its twin.
Watson knew that he could leave it to Sherlock to prove the truth in a way a court would understand, but within himself, he was sure. The sort of man who lived in Will Graham's home was the same sort of man who'd pulled the trigger to save his best friend on a dark night in London, and that man would not—could not—be a cold-blooded killer. As far as John was concerned, that was all there was to it.