==Chapter 5==
Two Worlds, One Heart

I'm afraid that sometimes, you'll play lonely games too. Games you can't win, 'cause you'll play against you.
— Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!

"What's the movie?"

Holmes shook his head, still engrossed in Beth's phone. "Documentary, twenty-first century." He paused the display, and looked up at Watson in the bedroom doorway. "Watson, did you ever wonder what might have happened if Guy Fawkes had succeeded in blowing up Parliament? Somebody will actually build a full-sized replica, with the same amount of gunpowder and everything!" The sheer size and power of that explosion was going to make its way into his dreams, he just knew it.

"Sounds very interesting. Oh, have you seen the one that someone made about 1896?"

Holmes's brow furrowed – Watson's tone was suspiciously nonchalant.

"It's called," Watson added, tone becoming sterner, " 'Idiot Detective Husbands and Their Big Mouths'." He sat down on the bed, keeping his voice low. "Holmes, what in the world have you been saying to Beth? Did you know that she's out there in the sitting room right now, falling asleep over one of your pamphlets?"

Really? Holmes perked up, only just managing to keep from asking which monograph Beth had been reading as he caught the look in Watson's eye.

Watson shook his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. "You two are going to be the death of me. You have enough self-destructive tendencies between the pair of you to keep a psychiatrist rich for years."

"But I don't understand... Beth hasn't seemed upset lately! She even helped Lestrade with that garden wall robbery..." Which you're not supposed to know about, remember? But Watson merely sighed, then gestured for Holmes to continue. "Well, it was concluded, after all, there was nothing for me to contribute!" Not that you didn't try... "Although she... might have gotten a little short with me about deducing where she'd been..."

Watson shook his head again. "You didn't say anything in the way of greeting, did you. Went right to the deduction?"

"A Labrador?" Holmes's mouth became an 'O', closing his eyes with a groan. "Yes..."

Watson sighed deeply, clearly choosing his words with care. "Holmes, Beth is more tolerant of your quirks and flaws than I ever thought any woman could ever be, but even she has her limits." He frowned as Holmes winced, cheeks warm. "And yet, it still doesn't explain her sudden obsession with your monographs. The case went well—it was wrapped up in a few hours, for God's sake. Even her low self-esteem would have to go into overdrive to find fault with that kind of outcome!"

Holmes's blush deepened. "Ah. I... might have said something to the effect that Lestrade was... making do until I recovered?" "Good Lord, he must be missing me on cases!"

A soft groan escaped the doctor. "I take it that was a joke, and one she might even have let pass if things haven't been so..." He dragged a hand down his face. "Holmes, I'm worried about her."

Holmes nodded, grimacing down at the blankets. "I will make it right, Watson." Beth shouldn't ever have been made to feel like a consolation prize!

That evening, Beth took dinner for herself and Sherlock upstairs on a tray, two bowls of tomato soup that was so much better than the canned stuff she'd grown up with. She knocked on the bedroom door to announce her arrival, then entered. In a deliberately terrible French accent, she declared, "Dinner is served!"

Holmes chuckled. "Merci, madame."

She smiled and set the tray down over his lap. "Please," she continued playfully, "make sure you finish while everything is still reasonably warm, because the greatest tragedy of this era is that we're apparently still about eighty years out from any decent microwaves. I looked it up and it made me very sad." How hard could microwaves be to invent and mass-market, really?

Sounds like your cue, old boy. "...That hasn't been the only thing, has it?"

She frowned smilingly as she sat on the bed. "What are you talking about?"

"What I said to you after your case with Lestrade. I, er, understand you've been poring over my monographs since then?"

Beth blinked. "I'm just... trying to learn. I mean —" her eyes went wide with memory — "there's a lot I don't know. I found that out when I was out with Grandpa Geoffrey." She didn't like to be caught out not knowing something simple like sand going into mortar.

Holmes nodded slowly, frowning. "But I don't imagine my attitude helped at all. Love, what I said was thoughtless and insensitive. You were trying to prove to your grandfather, and to me, what you could do, and there I was, trying to upstage you." He looked down at the tray and murmured, "I was jealous, Beth... so I showed off. I'm sorry."

She shifted uncomfortably, not having expected any of this — it should have been water under the bridge, right? "Um... honestly, I was expecting, um..." worse behavior than that... "oh, never mind about that." She blushed: contrary to what her husband appeared to be thinking, she needed to have some faith in him, that he could behave as a mature adult. "Sherlock, it's... it's fine, it's no big deal."

Except that with Beth, 'fine' often meant exactly the opposite... "You know, you are allowed to agree with me that I was being a jerk. Love, if you're genuinely interested in learning more about forensics from those papers of mine, I've no objection..." At least someone was actually reading what he'd written! "As long as it's for the right reasons. I don't want you studying at all hours because those careless words of mine made you feel like a... a raw recruit." Rather than a detective in her own right. "You did a good job on the Evans case, Beth."

Flattered and flustered at the same time, she blushed again and dropped her gaze. "I know I did." She looked back up. "I just also know that there's a lot that I don't know, and I need to learn and..." She shook her head, her heartbeat erratic against her ribcage. "I don't know why you're making such a big deal about this!"

"Perhaps," Holmes sighed, "because you've had me as a patient for nearly two months, non-stop? The last thing I want is for you to make yourself ill because you've forgotten how to slow down!"

Beth flinched. "Slow down?" she echoed sardonically. "Please, I should be so lucky that anything around here would ever happen fast enough that I'd have to." Sherlock may have lived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for a little while, but she had a feeling he still didn't understand just how slow life in the nineteenth truly was, medicine included. "...except for food cooling." She nodded at his bowl. "Better get going on that — no microwaves." She grabbed her own bowl and tucked into it, wanting to leave to clear her head... but knowing that would make things worse.

Holmes silently picked up his bowl, swearing inwardly. He should have considered just how utterly bored Beth must be, stuck at home nursing him, no wonder she'd been throwing herself into study! And now he had even less idea of what to do about that, he couldn't heal any faster than he already was. If only he didn't have such a strong feeling that, sooner or later, the decision to take things easy would be taken out of his wife's hands altogether. Watson was right, Beth was far too much like himself in that for comfort...

"Sally?" John put his head around their bedroom door, where Sally was reading Kathy her picture book. "Beth... is downstairs doing laundry..."

His wife frowned as she took in his expression. "And?"

"She's crying." And despite all the progress they'd made, Watson didn't think Beth would appreciate his company just now.

Sally nodded at once, scrambling up. "Take Kathy, I'll go."

"Right you are. Come on, darling," he murmured to Kathy, starting to fuss as she was handed over. "Aunty Beth needs Mama..."

Sally tapped softly on the scullery door. "Beth? Can I come in?"

Beth inhaled sharply, trying to pull herself together — but the tears were still coming, darn it. "Yeah." She half-turned from where she was sitting on the floor to see Sally enter and close the door behind her. Hastily, she wiped at her face with her sleeves, hands full with a stained skirt, breath hitching. "Hey."

"Hey." Sally gave her friend a faint smile, coming over to sit beside her. "Watcha doing?"

"Got soup on my skirt last night and it's not coming out. I don't... I don't know what I'm doing wrong."

"Ooh, tomato, yeah. Um, have you tried white vinegar yet?" Another trick from Mrs. Hudson's storehouse of knowledge, gratefully received.

Beth shook her head. Stupid, stupid... "Didn't think of it."

"I can get it if you..." Except this wasn't really about soup stains, was it? "Maybe later?"

"I wanna get it out now — I've spent too long trying to get this zedding thing clean..." Beth rose slowly, aching from sitting on the hard floor.

"Beth..." Sally reached out tentatively, then hesitated at the look in her friend's eye. "Bottom pantry shelf, left side."

"Okay." Beth made it to the pantry before a light sob escaped her. Her mind was going into overdrive, creating all kinds of nasty conclusions about why Sally hadn't yet asked what was going on when Beth was obviously crying... Not that you understand it yourself. She returned with the vinegar and dropped back down in front of the laundry tub, brushing at her tears with the back of her hand. What the zed is wrong with me?!

Sally handed her a clean rag. "Just blot it on, then leave it for a bit."

"Okay... You know, you can just..." Beth waved her hand at the door when her voice wouldn't continue. "'m fine."

Sally smiled wryly past the lump in her own throat. "Yeah, me too." Shuffling closer, she put her arm around Beth's shoulders. "And I'm good right here."

Beth whimpered and hunched her shoulders in shame, shaking her head.

"Oh, honey..." Sally tightened her hold. "What's wrong?"

"I don't know! I was cleaning this stupid skirt and I just started crying and I don't know why..." Beth did let herself lean a little into the older girl's hold, though.

"It's okay, honey. Hey... with everything we've all been through the last few months? It's a wonder any of us are even getting out of bed in the morning." Hell, she certainly wouldn't some days if she didn't have to feed Kathy!

"But everything's okay now! I mean, Sherlock is getting better and nobody else got hurt..."

Sally shook her head sadly. "S'not how it works, sweetie, you know that. Those awful things still happened, and it doesn't stop hurting just because we survived."

"Mm..." Beth rested her head on Sally's shoulder. "Don' wan' it," she mumbled.

"Yeah." Sally leaned her head against Beth's with a sigh. Me either.

It was two days later that Beth tried it. She was beyond grateful that Sherlock was alive and okay, but now that the worst was over, she had relaxed only for all her emotions to come crashing down on her.

And suddenly and keenly, she missed her mom.

She locked herself away in the bathroom and pulled the Vortex Manipulator — or "VM," as she and Sally had come to call it — out of her pocket. It wasn't until the VM beeped out a positive lock on the space-time coordinates she wanted that she let out the breath she hadn't realized she was holding.

A flash, a breathtaking rush of air, and lights and colors whizzed past her, too fast almost to register that anything was happening at all. And then she was on the grass of her own backyard, and she could breathe again.

She blinked owlishly at her surroundings — the sunlight was bright and full and warm like she hadn't felt or seen in over a year, and the yard was full of the deep greens of the peak of summer.

With effort, she shook her head, and realized she was crying. It had been so long, and she'd missed home more than she would ever have admitted to anyone.

Mama. Find Mama. She opened the back door as quietly as she could on its creaking old hinges, and trod softly up towards the kitchen, where Mama would be just starting to fix dinner. She heard all the normal — but almost forgotten — noises of dinner prep starting, the cupboards snapping and drawers screeching and metal and plastic hitting the countertop.

At the wall that separated the dining room from the living room, Beth stopped and hung back.

She could hear her two-year-old brother Cameron babbling a string of real words and toddler talk, and Mama was saying, "It is a pretty little train, isn't it?," the smile audible in her voice.

I can't do it.

Beth was shaking, every inch of her yearning to move forward, but her feet remained stubbornly rooted to the floor. She wanted to tell her mother everything — the Doctor, Sherlock and John, time and space, Sally, Frozen Time, Sherlock's illness (how does being married work, Mama?)… and she couldn't do it. She couldn't make herself take the few steps to be visible to Raquel Lestrade, and see her mother's shock and disappointment in her daughter. Ran away and got married, and now you gotta live with the consequences.

Home was never going to be home again; it couldn't be. Not after everything that had happened. Not once her parents knew.

Crying silently, Beth started the VM back up to return her to her previous space-time coordinates.

"Beth?" Mama called, then stopped. "Oh, that's right, she's outside."

And then in a rush of air, home was gone.

And it was a very long time before Beth could leave the upstairs bathroom in 1896.

The lack of anything much to do was still dragging at Holmes, but after a night of particularly vicious coughing, he was too tired to be bored. Beth had lent him her phone for ebook reading, although her suggestion of reading material, The Devil in the White City, was only making him want to use the Vortex Manipulator to hunt down America's first serial killer. Despite the engrossing read, he found himself drifting in and out of sleep all afternoon… but on the umpteenth time, he woke not to silence, but his wife's voice wafting from the next room, singing quietly.

What would I give
To live where you are?
What would I pay
To stay here beside you?
What would I do to see you
Smiling at me?

His chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the damn pneumonia. Beth's choice of songs was always a good indicator of her state of mind, and this song, filled with so much yearning, indicated nothing good.

Where would we walk?
Where would we run?
If we could stay all day in the sun?
Just you and me
And I could be
Part of your world

The pain in his chest sharpened. She was part of his world… wasn't she? Didn't she believe that? As uneasy as she can be with this time period? a dark corner of his mind hissed. Do you?

Ria: That documentary Sherlock was watching at the beginning of the chapter is 'The Gunpowder Plot: Exploding the Legend', presented by Richard Hammond. The repercussions of a successful assassination by Guy Fawkes et al would make a great DW episode all by itself...

Sky: Brrr! And yes, we know this chapter's kind of depressing, sorry, but we swear this is all going somewhere! *cough cough acertaincanonadventure cough* In the meantime, Happy New Year! Hope it's a better one for all of us!