Author's Note: So sorry for the slight delay – back again with a new chapter, and I hope you like it! This is where Sim takes Holmes as he's being treated by Abbie, and I leave it up to you if you believe it is magic, mesmerism or simply the meanderings of a feverish mind. What do you think? I welcome your thoughts and reviews. _
Sherlock Holmes knew he was being mesmerized, led into a dreaming trance by a rare practitioner of the art form (or science, some would call it, he mused) - and yet he trusted Simza and allowed her to lead him. Once again she took him high above the unending agony of his wounds, and they walked together in a shadowland for what seemed to him a very long time. He felt oddly content, with her beside him, and he felt for an instant or two that Watson was there, too, although he couldn't see him in the surrounding brightness-that-was-dark.
He pondered that conundrum – how could an all-enveloping darkness be so bright and so alive?
He had no answers, and yet he felt somehow that all the answers were here.
There were other beings here, too – he sensed their presence and their welcome, even after Watson's fleeting presence was gone. It occurred to him that maybe he was dead, well and truly dead, this time, and that this was what it was like, life after life, and that he might wander here forever, a shade among shades. The thought made him neither happy nor unhappy; it simply was.
As soon as he thought it, he intuited (rather than saw or felt – because his eyes and body didn't seem to be working properly - and yet he felt he could see more than he had ever seen before) Sim holding his hand tighter, and smiling at him.
We are not dead, she said, without saying it, and he seemed to receive her thought directly. This is not the land of souls – no one living can go there yet. This is the world between worlds, and we create it, what is in it, with our thoughts, with the living energy of our dreams and our reveries. It is at once within us and outside our ken, familiar yet foreign, far away yet inside us. It is where all the stories of mankind live, the art, the music, all the architecture of every city that ever was or shall be, the essence of our beings and ourselves.
Fascinating, said Holmes, and he meant it, and felt her delight at his reaction. He looked around him with his not-eyes, at the blackness that was not black, but that pulsed with all the colors known to human eye, and more besides.
Create something then, he thought to her, and she laughed with joy and told him, you can do it too. Holmes.
And suddenly the world changed.
They were back – back in time, on that night when the gypsy bonfires still burned brightly, embers swirling into the night sky as the violins laughed and sang. Simza's hand was warm in his as she lifted the olive-colored velvet flap and led him through the People's communal tent, deserted now save for a few small children dozing on piles of pillows, waiting for their elders to return from the dance.
Simza turned to face him and brushed her lips butterfly-soft across his stubbled cheek, breathing in the taste of him. "Not here," she said teasingly. "My tent is just over there…"
He caught her small face in one hand and caressed her full lips with his thumb, parting them slightly before pressing his mouth to hers and pulling her to him. He felt the surge of his desire as his tongue met hers and they breathed into each other; he roughened his grasp and ran his hand down her spine as he felt her arch toward him. She gasped and he felt her mold her body to his, and he wanted her so much…and…the music…
… the music was loud, so loud; it wrapped itself around his brain and his being; it joined with his arousal, it brought his walls down…and suddenly a part of his control, his control, his control…slipped away…
And in an instant his brain opened up and let Everything in.
The shock of it, the flood of it, never ceased to astonish him, as much as it also destroyed him. His fragile sense of control was, quite obviously, a sham, and his poor brain was still as sick and helpless as it ever had been. Had he not mastered it at last, his bête noir, his monster, the ravening thing that harried his brain and, since childhood, had threatened to overcome it?
For the very thing that made him Sherlock Holmes, the man who sees Everything, was the thing that also gnawed at the edges of his sanity and could reduce him – the moment his blockades were down - to a shivering ruin. Holmes had carefully constructed, throughout the course of his life, a series of mental exercises, every one of them as patiently fashioned, sharpened and honed as his Oriental fighting practice. All of them designed to create the boundaries that helped him shut Everything out, or at least to control his brain enough to let him survive, to give him the semblance of being a normal person. To shut out – at least enough to let him function normally – the sights, the sounds, the smells, the touch, the feelings, Everything that crowded into his brain, every waking moment of every single day of his existence.
But his carefully built barriers had failed him yet again. He would never be normal.
And Holmes knew oh please not now not again that he was lost, the moment was lost - and this woman too was lost to him, as so many others had been.
Simza's surprised, hurt face as he suddenly pulled away from her. The woman scent of her arousal, the green flecks in her dark eyes that caught the lamplight. The pounding, beautiful pain of the music – his brain naming each note and assigning it a color – a green D, yellow C's in a row, magenta E's, rondo and arpeggio and cadenza rising and falling in great mountains and valleys of sound and hue. The jangle of jewelry…the sound of harsh men's voices urging on the dance…Watson's inebriated laughter…Watson…The child breathing sleep softly on the pillows…The drink decanter – copper, it was, not brass…The lamps – lit about three hours ago, judging from the wicks…Sim's fragrance – not Parisian, probably German, where would a gypsy buy German perfume? The caravan must come here through Germany…slightly off its peak so it must have been months ago, probably in Köln… The smell of garlic and paprika…Hungarian paprika, mellow with a smoky sweet edge to it, perhaps from Szeged or the region…The unique black and red geometric pattern of the woven rug beneath their feet, with its stylized animal patterns… bokhara, Hyderabad, probably 1790s…STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT…
He closed his eyes and shuddered, trying in vain to fight it, battling the old urge to run away, to get away from the stimuli, the hammering, overwhelming waves that crashed upon him. His desire for Simza was a cruel joke, nothing more. She would be repulsed, as all the others throughout his life had been (except for three…Adler, dear bohemian Adler; she had understood, had known the heart of him…and Mycroft, who suffered much the same illness, but controlled it in his own peculiar ways, shutting himself off from humanity. And Watson, his lodestar, his haven, the quiet and always steady center of his world…).
"Holmes," said Simza, then, and her voice was soft. He realized that he had not only pushed himself away from her, but that his eyes were flickering from one side of the tent to the other; his breathing was harsh and he was still shaking. He must look to her like a madman.
"Holmes, please, look at me."
She was still there, and there was no repulsion in her eyes; only affection and concern. He concentrated all his being on the touch of her hand on his arm, and in a few moments it was better. He forced himself to look at her, although every fiber of his consciousness wanted to look away.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he whispered, and realized he was repeating it like a mantra. She stroked his arm as if he were a skittish colt. He steadied his breath, mantra working; all right, it was all right, she had not fled. She looked at him deeply, then pulled his face to her throat and simply held him there for a long time, while he rested his cheek against the warm softness of her and his heartbeat slowed, and he silently, painstakingly raised his frail blockades again, curbing his senses, shutting out just enough of the world and its painful maelstrom.
And Simza was still there.
Much later, Holmes and Simza lay together in her tent, their naked bodies limned by the golden light of the lamps, as their hands explored the map of each other. Their lovemaking had been gentle, then frenzied, until finally Holmes had consumed himself and his poor mad brain in her lush, eloquent body and his desire.
Now she looked at him, one hand caressing his face as he closed his eyes and drowsed. "Tell me," she said. "You, man with a face like this, with a mind like yours, with a hero's notion to save the world. Why do you hate yourself so?"
He opened his eyes and blinked. "What sort of question is that?" All semblance of drowsiness was gone now.
"You heard it."
"You," he murmured, fingering her hair, "have the potential to cause me great consternation."
"You," she pointed out gently, "are deflecting the question."
He rolled over onto his back and stared at the tent, the angles of it as it peaked and disappeared into darkness. "Indeed," he said. "It's what I have spent a lifetime doing." He wondered why he would confide this to a woman he had just met days ago, no matter how intimate they had just been.
"I think I know you," she said soberly. "You could close yourself off completely, retreat from it all, yet you do not. You ride out like a warrior each day, with your sword, and you shield your mind as you have since childhood, but sometimes the shield fails, and it all fails, and everything rushes in…"
He turned to her and stared. "How..how do you know this?"
She smiled at him, a sad smile. "Holmes, I am chovexani, the People's soothsayer. It was born in me, and in my mother before me. It is a gift, and a curse. I must exist outside the boundaries of the People and their ways, and it is who I am. It is why I could lie here with you tonight – any other unmarried woman of the People would be kept pure, guarded by her family. But chovexani may choose whom she wishes to be with."
Simza turned onto her back, and a tear slipped from the corner of the eye Holmes could see. "The chovexani suffers for her freedom, though. Like yours, my mind is open to…so much. I saw it in you tonight, and I felt your pain and your fear and your sadness, for it is mine, too. I sometimes do not know if soothsaying is magic, as we would say, or merely a sort of deduction, as you would have it."
"I don't wish to insult your beliefs, Sim, but you may have gleaned that I have no great affection for the notion of magic," he said lightly, to try to hide his wonder at her insight. "Though I do believe that this world is very full of a vast number of whimsical and rather wondrous things."
"Yes, and we are quite blessed to be alive in it," she said, so seriously that he couldn't help but smile. "You feel this too. You love this world, no matter how much it pains you. It is why you want to save it, to fight for justice, to help me find my brother, to battle the evil ones who would hurt your friend."
"You are quite a soothsayer." He tried to keep his voice steady, for this flow of her perceptions had shaken him to the core.
"I can teach you things, Holmes," she said. "Many powerful ways to close out the noise and the storms of this world. Perhaps it was a kind of fate that brought us together, here, now. Because you must learn to protect yourself, to fight the great battle that is to come."
"You've intuited that too."
"I know it, yes."
"Then teach me," Holmes said. "Because the battle is upon us, and it is one that we must win, or everything is lost."
She turned back to him, and her eyes were shining, and he could not tell if they held tears or joy, or both. "First love me again, Holmes. Our night has just begun, and we can still have a moment."
"Or, preferably, longer," he said, and ran his hand lightly down her golden throat, her neck, her perfect breast.
Outside the tent, the stars whirled, and Watson drank deep red wine with the men, and the women sang, and somewhere out in the fields a fox hunted, low in the grass, a silent shadow in the night. And Sherlock Holmes walked with Simza in the all-encompassing darkness that somehow pulsed with light, and saw it all.