Joy falls into sorrow.
A good day falls into a rainy day.
A smile falls into a frown.
Everyone falls.
Even Sherlock.
Except he wasn't supposed to.
He was supposed to always be there, cooking up his confounded experiments one moment,
and scratching away at the violin the next.
He was supposed to be here when Mycroft came to call, or Mary dropped by,
or Mrs. Hudson made a cake.
He was supposed to be here.
Every.
Single.
Day.
Except he wasn't.
Because he fell.
"Why?"
Watson sat quietly before the fireplace; his damp boots sat before the grating to dry. The rain pounded the streets with unrelenting tears, and the hansoms outside rattled by without notice of the broken man beyond the second story window.
The paper lay across his knee, article after article on the front page that in the past would have been shared by the two men over tea, culminating in an 'adventure.'
Today, it was All Hallow's Eve, and while the world was celebrating, Watson sat in lonely silence.
"Why did you leave me?"
His question was almost sullen, dark, frustration tightening the tendons in his steady doctor's fingers, and his hands curled themselves into fists. He felt the energy twisting up his insides into an unrelenting hum of tension that begged for the slightest thing to release it at once.
That release came in the form of a knock.
But it wasn't a knock at the door.
It was at the window.
In seconds, the tension left his shoulders, flowing into his hands, then outward, dissipating in the confusion of the moment.
Watson laid aside the afternoon paper, damp and bedraggled from his walk in the rain,
and tiptoed to the window.
A bitter curiosity settled into his throat, as an odd realization of what he would see
struck his consciousness.
He drew back the curtain and stumbled back.
There he crouched, bedraggled and weary, his woolen Inverness turned up at the collar.
His lean face was grey, chilled, and his thin hands clutched his deerstalker in a pleading posture that left Watson both confused and dismayed.
"Holmes!" he exclaimed, wrenching open the latch of the small window and inadvertently allowing the taller man to fairly tumble into the floor of the warm study. "What are you doing out there!"
"Sorry, old fellow," Holmes replied faintly, rising to his hands and knees.
"Just needed somewhere to get dry."
"As you should!" Watson felt as if his voice was coming out quite squeaky and he coughed. "Just, get over by the fire there, Holmes, you are chilled to the bone."
Watson quickly spent the next few moments fussing around the kitchen, pouring tea, and whiskey for his friend. He gathered up the fallen paper, sure that Holmes would want to go over everything that had happened since his...
Fall.
The teacup was falling.
The whiskey was falling.
The paper was falling.
Sherlock had fallen. Watson had seen it.
But how was he here?
The reality fell with a shattering pain in his temple, and Watson stepped over the broken china to stumble into the doorway of the familiar, lonely study.
It was empty.
"Holmes?"
Bitterness rose in the back of his throat. No, he had been here. His friend had been here. Right at his fingertips. And now he was gone again.
"Holmes!"
Watson rushed to the window, grasping the curtains and nearly wrenching them off their wrought iron rod to see beyond them. Only a view of rain-streaked glass met his eyes, and the frosted glass distorted the droplets into a macabre form of art.
There was no way he would have seen Holmes outside the window.
"The glass is frosted," Watson spoke softly, weakly.
"Watson!" Mrs. Hudson burst into the room, her face pale and a hand clutched to her chest.
"Watson, I heard glass shatter, are you well?"
He wasn't sure what he said to her, but she seemed calmed, and she swept up the fragments,
glancing at him every so often with concern.
He was grateful when she left.
He settled into the old armchair again, hardly daring to believe what had just happened.
His eye fell again upon the paper, a personal ad, and he read it at first with no interest, then he sat up and read it again, with a chill around his spine.
"In the old religion,
they called it Samhain.
It's the night
when the walls 'tween
the worlds grow thin,
and spirits of the underworld
walk the earth.
A night of masks
and balefires,
when anything is possible, and
nothing is quite as it seems."
His confusion turned into consternation as he realized that Holmes's pipe and violin were now missing.
They had once sat upon the fireplace mantle, in reverence for his lost friend.
They were gone.
Along with his specter.
Part of him wanted to run and shout for the police, 'Thief! Thief!'
Part of him longed for the blessed peace in the hope that Holmes was simply hiding and had just stopped by for his things - in true dramatic, Holmes fashion.
Not so far away, a lean figure sat before a similar fireplace, pipe resting upon the side table, lean fingers drawing a wailing bow across sad violin strings.
He had fallen.
So had Watson.
So had London.
