You are not alone.

Though not spoken aloud, Holmes had spoken it all the same, and the phrase rang through my mind. A wealth of information lay in those four short words, but the most important part was that this one had scared him. It had been many years since a regression had truly scared him. What had I done?

I had no idea. The last thing I remembered was settling on the beach to watch the sunrise. The air had been cool, but the breeze had been warm, and I had been content to listen to the waves in the strengthening breeze and watch the sky change color. The colors had been amazingly bright, far brighter than I remembered London's ever being.

Gunfire sounded faintly, and I tensed, wondering if I was still half-caught in a memory. Was I about to find myself back on the battlefield?

"It is coming over the channel, Watson."

Is that what triggered this?

Possibly. Unexpected gunfire carried on the strengthening breeze could have sent me into a memory, but while my breathing had slowed, my words had not yet returned to say as much. I had been three steps away from a regression for days now, and I had let down my guard on the beach. I was still trembling violently as well.

Holmes moved in front of me, readjusting from a kneeling position to sit on the ground, and I faintly noticed he was still in his nightclothes. I would have had to majorly scare him to bring him all the way from the cottage. Had I called out during the regression?

"Say something, Watson."

I opened my mouth, but the words refused to come, a fragment of memory rushing forward instead as the wind changed direction. I squeezed his hand as an acknowledgement and tried not to flinch.

"Can you stand?" he asked. "I believe I am sitting in a puddle."

Amusement coursed through me, and I tried to smile, knowing he was trying to gauge how aware I was. I could not tell how much of my grin reached my face, but some must have, as he relaxed minutely as he helped me up.

I was still trembling, and Holmes kept my arm firmly in his over the short walk back to the cottage, taking a more direct route across the grass rather than down the beach. He opened the door and led me towards the settee only a couple of minutes later.

"T-thank you," I finally managed quietly, my trembling finally starting to slow as I wondered why the journal I had left near my bed was now in the middle of the sitting room.

Holmes' gaze had never left me over the slow walk home, and stark relief flickered across his face at my quiet words. Something had happened while I was caught in the memory, but I was not wet, so I could not have wandered into the waves. Had I cried out? Had he woken thinking I was under attack?

Not wanting to leave me long enough to make tea, he hurried toward the kitchen, coming back almost immediately to set a pitcher of water and a full glass within reach before sinking into his chair. I grabbed a paperweight off a nearby table, passing it between shaking hands though I made no effort to speak at first.

I finally broke the silence when he continued staring at me. "Holmes?"

"What triggered it?" he asked instead of answering my silent question.

I shrugged, my gaze on the paperweight I still passed back and forth. "I don't know. It could have been the gunfire on the breeze, but I remember nothing aside from waking early and deciding to watch the sunrise. I do not even remember the memory this time."

"What about nightmares?"

"What about them?" I returned.

"Have you been having nightmares?" His voice was just slightly too tense. "Did nightmares cause this?"

Had I been hiding nightmares was what he was truly asking, and I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at him.

"Of course I have, but no, the nightmares did not cause this." I looked up, studying him as an idea struck. He had very little data from which to work, but nightmares were rarely the direct cause behind a regression. They usually brought the memories to the fore while another trigger sent me into the regression. I would not have expected a nightmare to be his first thought unless—

"Is that why my journal is in the middle of the floor?"

He started, covering it by readjusting in his chair as he glanced at the floor. He had projected his own thoughts onto me, something he very rarely did, which meant that I was not the only one who had endured a nightmare this morning. I had not lived with Holmes for so many years without learning something of deduction, and I started applying what I knew.

A nightmare had roused him sometime after I left the cottage, and he had gone into my room. He would only have gone into my room if the nightmare had been centered on me, and it would have bothered him to find the room empty. That explained why he had grabbed my journal. He might have looked to confirm there was an entry dated yesterday, but something else was at play here. Why had he followed me down to the beach in his nightclothes?

"Did I cry out during the regression?" I finally asked.

He shook his head, knowing what I was trying to do and watching to see if I would succeed. I could not deduce as rapidly as he could, nor could I deduce more than some basic information, but I could tell he wanted me to figure out why he had followed me rather than having to explain. I had already noticed enough that he knew I would ask if I did not solve it, and deducing this made a useful distraction to move on from the regression. With that tacit permission, I forged forward.

What kind of a dream would send him sprinting from the cottage in his nightclothes? It could not have been a normal nightmare, where he relived an old case or its aftereffects. The journal and our location would have undeniably proven those wrong as well as any dream that I had died in the war. Except one.

"Was the telegram true?"

Telegrams had gotten crossed on my way home, and Holmes had gotten Private Watson's death notice instead of my travel plans. As ranks were not included in the telegrams and we shared both first and last names, I had returned to find that he had thought me dead for a number of days. Dreaming that the telegram had been accurate would have sent him searching the town for me, nightclothes or no.

He opened his mouth, closed it, and shook his head. "Do you remember the bridge troll?"

I nodded. The bridge troll was a term Londoners had applied to a man we had caught over twenty years before. The man waited on a walking bridge on the other side of London for unsuspecting pedestrians, mugging them when they passed by.

"What about the cab accident in '95?"

I nodded again. Our cab had collided with another when the other driver had cut a blind corner too sharply. We had escaped relatively uninjured, but a pedestrian caught beneath the horses' hooves had not been so lucky.

"And the bridge where the railings were low enough to trip over but high enough to prevent aid?"

"What about them?"

He gestured for patience, to let him tell me the only way he could.

"The Case of the Forgetful Clerk?"

A head injury had left a man essentially trapped in the same day, and he had held such a repetitive job that the problem had gone unnoticed for nearly two weeks. He arrived at work on time, and he did everything that had been part of his daily schedule, but he missed anything new. He missed meetings. He consistently forgot the new task that had been assigned the day after his injury, and he had no idea who his brother was when the other man arrived unexpectedly. It had been this last part that got him the help he needed, but what did this have to do with the dream that had sent Holmes to the beach in his nightclothes?

My confusion showed on my face, and Holmes readjusted in his chair. "Combine them," he said quietly. "You woke two days after the accident, and you had lost all memory of my return. You reacted with horror, grief when I walked into your room, and you refused to follow me into the sitting room, leaving to catch a cab to your old practice instead. When you found Verner there, you went to the bridge, where the man tried to mug you. I intervened, but he shoved you toward the railing. I was not fast enough."

Then he had woken to an empty cottage, and when he finally found me, I had not known him. No wonder this one had scared him so badly that he still studied me as if I might disappear the next time he blinked. I pushed myself off the settee, ignoring the fine tremors still shaking me to lay a hand firmly on his shoulder. Sometimes the purposeful contact was all either of us needed.

"I'm fine, Holmes."

He finally relaxed, the stare he still directed at me now focused on making sure the tremors I could not yet smother did not ruin my balance. I sank into my chair before he had a reason to act on that worry.

"Did I hear you say a bird was following me?"

His smirk was not completely genuine, but it was close. "You did," he confirmed. "A small, fat, red bird stayed about twenty yards from you as you wandered up the sand toward the trees. It looked like a finch, but I did not get a clear enough view to be sure. Have you been feeding them?"

I nodded, watching to see if that would irritate him. "A shop in town has cornmeal for relatively cheap, and while the birds do not eat all of it, they eat some. I do that some days when you are studying your bees."

He hesitated. "Does this attract magpies or jays?"

I shook my head. "Both of those are larger birds. They might come for a snack, but they move along quickly enough. Cornmeal is nothing more than a treat I can use to coax the birds a little closer."

Silence answered me for a long moment as he thought about that. My trembling finally slowed enough I could cover it, and I sipped the glass of water.

"We could make a feeder to put behind the cottage," he said after a moment.

I glanced up, nearly spilling the water in surprise. "I did not want to interfere with your bees."

He waved off the worry. "There are no birds here that would hunt the bees." And that would provide another distraction on mornings like today.

I smiled, hearing the unspoken half of his reply just as easily as the spoken. The activity of a bird feeder would have provided another distraction this morning, one that might have kept me from going to the beach.

"I saw a wire cage in town the other day," I told him. "If we mixed suet with cornmeal and some seed, we could attract a variety of songbirds, and the openings were too small for the jays to use."

He nodded. Part of today would be spent building a bird feeder, but another of his comments came to mind just before I could get up.

"Did you say you wanted to add two more hives?"

He pulled himself to his feet and went to change clothes—as clear a yes as I had ever seen. I sighed.

Would he ever have enough bees?


No, Watson, Holmes can never have enough bees, just like this author can never get enough feedback. Thank you to those that have reviewed, and I hope you enjoyed this chapter! :D