I found him perched on the edge of his bed, clad in a nightshirt, knees drawn up and limbs wrapped around himself as though holding him together. There was a peculiar tension in his frame, a rigid, frozen sort of stillness, marred only by the slight tremor I could see in his shoulders. I recognized this as his peculiar manner of crying, and when he looked up as I entered, his grey eyes were indeed red-rimmed, his face tear stained.

"Good heavens," I said quietly, voice taut with concern, "Holmes, whatever is the matter?"

He shook his head, jaw clenching and lips pressing into a thin line in what may have been frustration. "I...I don't know," he replied helplessly, voice hoarse with tears. "I woke, and this started...and I couldn't stop." He looked away, scrubbing furiously at his eyes with his sleeve.

I left my bag in the doorway and crossed the room to sit beside him on his bed. It was easy enough to assume, I thought, that he was simply exhausted and overwrought following the case he had just concluded, but some instinct in me insisted that there was something more. Something which Holmes was unwilling, apparently, to admit to himself as well as to me. I had watched it eating away at him as he had worked, these past weeks.

"Do not ask me to explain, Watson," he whispered, chin resting on his knees as he stared fixedly at the flicker of the sole lamp lighting the room, as though he had anticipated my thoughts.

I shook my head. "No, dear fellow. There is no call to."

I did, however, reach out to pull him into my arms.

He flinched at first, eyes flying to meet mine with an almost panicked, feral look, but I had my arms around him before he could protest as he usually would have.

"You're alright, Holmes," I murmured to him as I pulled him towards me. "Easy, now."

He settled against my chest, but his eyes were wide, glassy with tears, and his already heightened breath quickened until his chin began to tremble once again. I felt a twinge of fear and regret as I wondered if I had not made a very grave misstep, but at last he sucked in a shuddering gasp and said:

"Watson..."

I shushed him and held him tighter. He turned to press his head against my shirtfront, clamping down on a sob between his teeth. "I can't get it out of my head," he quavered, shutting his eyes tightly as fresh tears rolled down his cheeks.

"What?" I asked.

"Her. How we found her. I remember everything. The bruises from the ropes on her wrists – it was wound around her right four times and her left seven. Bloody hell...why can't I stop seeing it?" He shook harder, choking back further sobs. "Why this one...now? I don't understand."

I had been wondering the same thing myself. He had seen more violent murders. "It might help if you were to tell me about it," I suggested gently.

"Why? You saw everything that I did."

"Just to get it out. Off your chest."

He said nothing more for what seemed like a long time, clinging to me desperately, until at last he appeared to some degree to compose himself. I had almost given up my suggestion as yet another completley passed over by him, but to my surprise he suddenly began to describe the scene which the memory of had so tormented him.

The detail he recalled was extraordinary. The number and location of marks on the victim's throat, the arrangement of her things scattered about the room, the footprints and signs in the carpet, even details about the weather on the day her body was discovered – all had been meticulously and mercilessly catalogued in his mind.

In one point, however, he erred.

He had begun relating the above to me calmly enough, but had gradually grown more agitated as he spoke, crying harder until he could barely utter a word through his tears.

"...And her ring," he stammered desperately at last. I had been stroking his hair, trying to calm him as he spoke, but froze here as his narrative suddenly seemed to depart from the facts of the crime we had investigated. "He'd removed the ring -" he choked out, and then seemed to loose control completely.

On all the occasions I had seen him shed tears, rare though they had been, I had never before seen him cry so. This, as well as the matter of the ring, I considered at first to indicate as clearly as an outright confession that it was not the victim concerned in his last case that he was grieving. That young woman had been unmarried, and murdered by her sister. His talk of a ring and the man who had apparently removed it would have been nonsensical in relation to the case.

I could do little more than hold him as he wept, murmuring platitudes to him and feeling generally useless. I could not say whether my efforts soothed him at all, but it was a mercy, at least, that the gruelling pace at which he had attacked the investigation had left him exhausted. Before long the sudden torrent of sobs had quieted to whimpers, and he slumped limp and unanimated as the dead in my grasp, utterly spent. I continued to hold him until his eyelids fluttered closed and his form grew heavy against mine with sleep.

There was little enough of that for me, that night. Holmes' own question had become stuck in my mind like a splinter, and I could not cease worrying at it.

Why this case, and why now? What facet of it had differentiated it from all the others, rendering it so grievous to him as to inspire this reaction? And, as the night wore on, I began to doubt if whatever in his own psyche had precipitated it was really as transparent as I had thought.

I had the apparent non-sequitur of the ring to go on, and nothing more. What was there to say, really, that this had constituted some sort of freudian slip, that it related to an incident which had somehow been both personal and terrible for him?

He was, I considered as I looked down at his grief-tattered, unconscious figure, after all a young man who had seen much violence and death in the course of his profession – as I had. Had I not also grieved, in a similar manner, for soldiers I had seen cut down on the battle field, and yet had never known? If ever I had doubted Holmes' humanity, I had little enough reason to do so now. It was possible that the burden of the sympathetic response all human beings experience at the death of another, and Holmes had a tendency to bottle up rather than acknowledge, had simply become too much. Perhaps this outburst had been precipitated by nothing other than time. It was also quite possible that the mistake concerning the ring had been only that – a mistake, a detail recalled from some other investigation allowed to slip into his narrative owing to the troubled and disordered state of his mind, and nothing more.

But if not...

What could the murder of a woman, and the loss of her ring, have meant to him? From what chapter of his past would such a memory derive? How could it be so terrible to him that even he could only look on it obliquely?

At last, with the watery grey light of dawn slipping in past the curtains, I was forced to admit that I had made no progress, and consign such questions to mystery.

I looked down at Holmes, wondering if it would be better to stay with him or retire to my own bed. He appeared quite unconscious, sleeping the sleep of the truly exhausted, dead to the world. At last I slipped out of the embrace we'd reclined in gingerly, settling his head carefully on his pillow. He did not stir.

When I finally woke later that day and joined him in the sitting room, I almost could have believed that none of the previous night's events had occurred – so much did he seem his usual, aloof self once again. In any event, we did not speak of it. He has made no similar mention of a murdered woman or her ring, since – and I have not asked him.

A/N: I wasn't quite sure what to do with this...it does not feel in character to me, but I could sort of see it happening, in some version of the universe... anyways, wasn't sure whether to consign this piece to the bottom of my documents folder forever or not, so I thought, what the hey, I'll put it on the internet. It was inspired by a phrase which I read in another fic and was intrigued by - a slight variation of which did manage to Oscar-Wilde its way into the second paragraph above, apologies, it seemed to fit. Unfortunately I recall neither the name of the fic nor the author – it was on lj?