Disclaimer: I do not own Sh22, although like everyone else I wish I did. I do not own Noelle, Christine, Jade or Kristall either. They belong to my friends, whom I have to thank for so kindly loaning their characters.
Help will probably be required along the way as I am a greenhorn at this. My sincere thanks go to kittyscratch91 for his/her advice. Now, where was I? Oh yes, the story, which is only a negative extrapolation of warped teenage friendships and is not to be taken seriously.
Greyson decided to pack us off that day. I guess he was tired of us buzzing around him like flies round a rotten banana. It was Advent, just a few weeks more to Christmas, and the criminals had been displaying "goodwill to all men". There hadn't been a single case for weeks. (Maybe they were busy wrapping their Christmas presents.) Oh, of course there were the usual petty thefts like a man swapping his cheap hat for rich man's expensive hat while the rich man was asleep on the Underground. The Yard gives those cases to the constables and the sergeants. I have a lot of friends who are constables.
Greyson called us into his office in the middle of the morning. He called up this file on his computer and showed us that we had 21 days of unclaimed leave each and told us to get lost because we had to use up all our leave before the year was up, so we had better not come back before Christmas. I told him it was his fault because our shifts are Monday-Friday and he made us work overtime on Saturday when we had cases. He just grinned and grinned (showing all his coffee-stained yellow teeth). I thought getting rid of us for Christmas was the best Christmas present he had ever received.
Holmes didn't say a word when we pulled away from the Yard. He just stared straight ahead. He stared all the way through three sharp turns and a near-fatal accident with a garbage truck that made a wrong turn.
"Holmes?" I asked, jerking him from his trance. "What are you going to do until Christmas?"
He shook his head languidly. "Nothing," he replied in a monotone. "Stay in London."
"London's no good for your health," I remarked, looking out into the smog that covered the city. "It's too noisy and too polluted. I'm going to Oxford to spend Christmas with my family. Since you're free, why don't you come along?"
He finally fell out of his stupor and tried to sit up straight in his seat. "Is the Oxford University still there?" he asked.
"Of course it's still there. But only people wanting to do postgraduates go there nowadays. Most undergraduates attend the London U."
He smiled and said nothing. I kept on talking on whatever subject my wandering mind happened to alight on, trying to keep him awake.
"You know, Freud is now credited as something of a genius, but in his day I bet he felt like the most wretched man on earth. He was trained as a neurologist, but he eventually switched over to psychology. He was absolutely bursting with bright ideas, but they were so radical and new that everyone thought he was crazy. He was practically living his entire life in isolation. He wanted someone to listen… and then he found a friend, Fliess. I guess at the time he met Fliess he must have been thinking that he would be friends with Fliess forever, but after a decade their friendship ended. To fill the void came a long line of successors and associates, like Adler, Jung… and then they all left him. Poor soul. It's hard on geniuses, isn't it?"
Holmes shifted so that his body was half facing me. "Did he find anyone he could trust in the end?"
I stared out into the sunset. "His daughter, Anna Freud carried on his work. So, in the end, he had no friends officially." I sighed. "It's awful, simply awful. You liked someone, were inseparable, and then they left you out in the cold."
Holmes' countenance grew more solemn. "Actually, I felt the same with Watson when he married," he said quietly. "But we got our act together, in the end. We ended up spending our retirement together."
Holmes was lucky. At least he finished up with a best friend.
He started talking again, a little hesitantly. "I've never really heard you talk about your life before I knew you and I know you're not that close to your friends whom I met while on that business of the crooked man…I suppose you have a best friend in Oxford?"
I decided not to answer. Everything I said about Oxford, about my friends or my family, always led straight back to my close-knit bunch of old friends back there and Noelle. Oh, that girl! I used to think she was my best friend when we were in school together, but after a few years I was convinced I was totally wrong. The memory was so bad it was a stab through the heart.
The rays of the setting sun shone into the car and onto the rosary I had dropped on the dashboard.To combat the rising frustration and anger that usually came with thinking of Noelle, Ipickedthe rosary up, recited prayers andtried not to crash the hovercar. I had to get back to Oxford and settle some old scores.