From the Post Hiatus Writings of Doctor John Hamish Watson
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Little Boys Found
It was the only time in my life that I had ever fainted. I cannot say that I remembered if I dreamed while I lay there, unconscious in my armchair, but I do remember the face that swam before my eyes only moments before they closed and I lay there at the mercy of whatever might come. It was Holmes's face, of course, exactly as I remembered it and yet somehow still utterly foreign. The gray eyes were just the same, bright and sharp and eager as they had always been, but there were new lines about them, and about his mouth, creased and deep. He looked older, and in that split second I wondered if I seemed older to him as well. Then I realized he was dead, and, as it seemed the only appropriate and gentlemanly thing to do considering the circumstances, I fainted.
When I woke, a few minutes later, I sat there and simply stared at him, making my best effort to grapple with the unreality of it all. I had dreamed of him, while he was gone, long, drawn out dreams, some dreams that frightened me and some that shamed me and some that filled me with too much joy to have room left for shame. These dreams, though, were only dreams, and a hundred times more terrible than any nightmare, for when I woke it was cold and the bed was still as empty as before. He was still gone. Still dead. Dead again. And so, of course, was she. I was alone. This had to be a dream as well, for Holmes to stand before me alive and thriving. There was no other way for it to be possible, that he was standing there, holding my hands in his, smiling nervously at me like a child afraid to be scolded. I had forgotten how solid his hands could be. When Mary had died, her hands had been less solid and tangible than the hands of a ghost, but Holmes, returned from the dead, had hands that were solid and honest. He might not tell me his secrets, but holding his hands in mine, I knew them all.
"Hello," he said, that well remembered tenor voice shaking like a leaf in the wind. "Hello, doctor."
"But who…how…"
"I…oh dear. I'm sorry." Holmes – excuse me, the impossible dream creature that could not by any stretch of the imagination be Holmes – collapsed into an armchair across from mine, one hand thrown over his face in what might have been despair, might have been remorse – indeed, might even have been amusement. "I am sorry." Somewhere in the back of my mind I recognized that Holmes had only apologized to me once before. "I am so very sorry. You –"
"Holmes…" My shell shocked brain was beginning to put the happenings of the past few moments together in some at least vaguely or mildly coherent fashion. "How…you…You're dead," I pointed out with utmost astuteness.
"No," he said weightily, almost as though he were a Catholic at confession. "No, plainly I am not."
"But you fell into that monstrous chasm!"
To my surprise, Holmes laughed, and his laughter filled the air with a quality I suddenly found that I had missed enormously. "I did not fall, Watson. No, my dear, dear fellow, I never fell in there. The late Professor Moriarty practically engineered his own suicide by arranging to meet me there, of all places, at all times. He was an old mathematics scholar, Watson, a strong, evil and bitterly tenacious old mathematics scholar, but an old mathematics scholar nonetheless. And I – well." His smile! Oh God, the way he smiled! How could I not have remembered such a thing in the crisp, sharp detail in which it was now placed before me? "I was very young. Well, it has only been three years, and I still am very young, I suppose, by that reckoning. But I was younger then. Far younger, in my heart and in my head."
Then he gazed straight at me, with all the disarming earnestness that had charmed me so much so many years before, and he smiled. "I was never in that chasm. It never claimed me, but there were other dangers, and copious ones. Come with me, and I shall explain."
I am sure I shall never forget that walk through London, the most profound feeling of déjà vu I have ever experienced, as we strode through the streets the way we had so many times so many years before, he speaking quickly and sensibly about some crime, I listening earnestly and trying my best to understand and assist him as best I could. It was as though he had never left, almost as though we were back in the days of the adventures of the speckled band and the Drebber murder. Ah, the Drebber murder! Good days, when we were still learning the nuances of each other's conversation, habits, and laughter…I could hardly remember, anymore, when the nature of our friendship had changed to love, simply because it had not seemed to change…
Love. I have written love. I cannot in good conscience write the word in conjunction with a man. It does not happen. It cannot happen.
It has happened.
He is lying in the bed of my old rooms at Baker Street now, asleep and resting as he says he has not rested in three long years. And I am sitting and writing once more of my friend. I knew it from the moment his hand touched my face again. We stood in the doorway, the old familiar doorway of 221 Baker Street, God bless it, and simply fell into each other, like a house of cards that had finally stopped resisting the pull of gravity. I remember this, I thought. I remember the scent of him, shag tobacco and gunpowder, I remember the way his mouth is on mine, I remember the contours of his face. There was so much I swore I had forgotten.
I had not.
I am a moral man, and a sensible man, and I know that men do not fall in love. At least, not with each other. With women, certainly. But I cannot deny what I feel. Can I go against what is essentially a matter of personal taste? I am not an invert. I have never felt inclined this way before I met him, and even after I met him it took months, years, for us to realize the true nature of our affections.
His hands, running deftly over me, have told me the truth. I love him. It is horrid and sordid, a commonplace problem, certainly not a three piper, simply a reality and a foolish one.
But it is a reality nevertheless.
