Holmes had already entirely forgotten the carriage ride back to Scotland Yard. He stood now, silent and still as stone in the morgue in the basement of St. Bartholomew's, and stared at the sheet which Lestrade had just pulled from Cartright's face. They had removed the boy's clothing in order to perform the autopsy. For long moments, Holmes could look at nothing save the Y-point of the incision, now stitched closed once again, which sectioned his chest and torso. The bin containing Cartright's personal belongings sat on the wheeled tray beside the dissection table. A new pair of shoes, unscuffed with solid soles, sat nestled atop all the rest; Holmes could see them in his periphery. They made him want to kill something.
"Holmes?" Watson touched his sleeve and moved to stand more fully beside him. His eyes were red and puffy. Holmes had not observed him weeping, and he wondered how long he had been standing here like this, to allow Watson time enough to do so, dry his face, and recover the faculty of unhindered speech.
"They have signed their death warrants," Holmes told him. It was too casual a thing to say, and too easy a manner in which to say it. Perhaps this was what normal people felt at the violent death of a…loved one? Child? Person of importance? He was not certain what Cartright had been to him. More than just a lost boy, but less than whatever it was that Cartright had believed himself to be to Holmes.
From his place at Holmes' shoulder, Watson shot Lestrade a covert glance. Assessing, that look: the soldier sizing up a man who was not currently an enemy, but who might soon become one. Holmes grasped the fingers resting on his arm and squeezed them briefly before letting them go. Watson stood down.
Lestrade cleared his throat and affected not to have heard anything as he pulled the sheet back over Cartright's face. "We could use his full name for the record."
"He had no other name," Holmes replied. He felt just as flat as he sounded. The sheet did nothing to block Holmes' view of the body; it merely occluded the surface. "His mother was surnamed Cartright; she was a prostitute and an opium addict, and is no longer living. There is no way to know who fathered the boy."
"I see." Lestrade pressed his lips together and sighed at the body. "Has he any other family we can contact?"
Holmes felt his head tilting to one side, slow like a pecan sliding through molasses. "We are his family." He indicated himself and Watson, then thought that perhaps he had better not speak on his friend's behalf in such weighted matters. He glanced to his side, questioning by the cant of his head.
Watson nodded without hesitation. "Holmes and I will claim the body, Inspector. By your leave, of course."
By his glare, Holmes dared Lestrade to defy him in this. Cartright would not be burnt to cinders in a dispassionate kiln, to be used as ashes to enrich a patch of garden soil filled with insipid, ugly little flowers, nor buried in a pauper's grave with a dozen other unnamed, unwanted, rotting carcasses. He met no challenge, however; Lestrade seemed perfectly content to give the boy over to them. Holmes nodded in recognition of this and averted his gaze. It came to rest on the bin of personal effects and he reached for it.
The shoes were set to one side, unexamined. Watson gave him a knowing look, but refrained from questioning his dismissal of the footwear. Shoes could tell one so much about a person, but the paltry amount of data that could be gleaned from Cartright's shiny new shoes, perfectly visible after only a glance, merely confirmed what Lestrade and the constable on the wharf had already told him. Anything else he may have learned – gait, stance, height, weight, general place of residence and regular local haunts – Holmes already knew.
The wooly cap came out next; there was blood on it that corresponded to the split in Cartright's left eyebrow. Holmes sniffed at the inner lining of the cap. Soap. The boy had found a favorable living situation, then – somewhere that allowed him to bathe regularly, to purchase and store soap. Holmes frowned at the short bristles of hair caught in the wool, plucked one out to look at, and then wondered why he had done so. Cartright had a full head of hair there on the morgue slab next to him, if he wished to examine it. The wool cap went on top of the shoes.
Next, trousers. Torn at the right knee, blood dried to black around the ragged edges. Discoloration from the knees down, likely gained while kneeling on the wall of the wharf. Thames water must have been puddled on the stones as Holmes could smell it tainting the fabric. He moved upward, checked the pockets even though he knew that the coroner, not to mention countless bobbies, would have already done so. Empty save for tiny bits of parchment that had likely rubbed from the edges of a scrap of paper, or a tobacco slip. Moving on. Cartright had soiled himself in his death throws. It was a perfectly natural occurrence – most people loosed their bowels at the end, especially if it were a violent one. Still, Holmes experienced an irrational wish that he could have somehow spared the boy the indignity. It was a pointless notion, and served nothing. Holmes set it aside with the trousers.
The shirt yielded brown-yellow stains acquired by immersion in water, no doubt sustained when reaching for the beggar's body. Holmes segregated the large, filth-ridden great coat which had once belonged to the beggar, and Lestrade found a new bin in which to store it. It bore out Holmes' theory as to the dumping of the beggar's body and its separation from its coat. A few farthings littered the pockets, and the silt stains appeared to match with those on the body they had viewed in situ this morning. The coroner would confirm that later, but Holmes was not in doubt. Any additional evidence had been ruined either by immersion in the Thames, or by the subsequent handling of the coat. For once, Holmes did not bother to lecture Lestrade on the handling of evidence; it could not be undone, and Holmes was too weary to bother raising his voice sufficient to a good dressing down.
Next came mittens with the fingertips cut off, covered in soot from a hearth fire. Braces that had been made from the pieces of two separate sets sewn together. A sweater with holes in the elbows, patched over with corduroy. Three pairs of thin summer socks, layered one over the other to keep out the chill of a London winter. Small clothes that had been well kept and often washed, but which now smelt of exertion and fear, also stained with blood and the byproducts of his death. Cartright's own coat, woolen and lined but light for being so threadbare. Holmes should have given him a new one; he had several that the boy would have accepted not as charity, but as a handing-down.
The non-clothing items found on the body lay scattered along the bottom of the bin. Holmes picked out the silver cigarette case, the same one that he had once left on a rock beside a waterfall to weight down the note he had written for Watson. He recognized the deep score across the back of it, gained in a knife fight while in pursuit of a fugitive. Holmes had not even been after the man with the knife; he had been trying to head off a fleeing suspect, had ducked into an alley, and a drunken man had pegged him for a good fight. The case had likely saved his life that night.
Holmes traced the scar marring the silver with his index finger, and then passed the case to Watson, who also knew it on sight. Watson made no sound other than to sigh, and opened the case to show Lestrade where the engraving could be observed beneath the lining.
"Bugger," Lestrade swore. "How in blazes did he get hold of this?"
"My guess would be the beggar," Holmes replied, distant. He watched himself sifting through the detritus cluttering the bottom of the bin. Buttons, bits of wood and stone, two cigarettes rolled poorly by young, inexperienced hands, a littering of tobacco chips, several handkerchiefs, and a bread knife with a leather wrapping bound about the handle to make a crude weapon of it.
"Guess?" Lestrade asked.
Holmes looked up, and something in his expression caused Lestrade to start and then fail to look away. "Yes. I have no facts, so a conjecture must do."
Lestrade shook his head, his forehead creasing into furrows. "But you never guess, Mister Holmes."
"Needs must, Inspector." Holmes picked up a slip of paper, the receipt from the cobbler, and stiffened. He sucked in a measured yet hasty breath and very carefully placed it back into the bin before moving away from the tray altogether. His heart had taken to a wild, unwarranted pounding and he arrested it through sheer force of will.
Behind him, Watson had obviously examined the receipt for himself, and Holmes heard him murmur, "Oh, Holmes."
Holmes wrung his hands as he felt his lips curl in revulsion and disdain. "It is immaterial, Watson. Boys need roots to call their own. In the absence of blood, they will latch onto anyone who shows an interest. It is basic instinct for a child to attach itself to a benefactor, to – to read more into a random kindness than is truly there. Children…a boy needs to belong to someone, is all. He will choose anyone convenient to him."
"What?" Lestrade demanded. "What is it?"
No doubt, Watson was showing him the sales slip, and the line where Cartight had given his name to the cobbler as Cartright Holmes.
"A childish fancy," Holmes asserted, forceful about it and yet unsteady somehow. "A game played out of – of desperation to fit in somewhere. It's pathetic."
Lestrade took a deep breath, and then said flatly, "It is not just some immature fancy, Mister Holmes. He did not choose just anyone to call himself after; he chose you."
"Yes, well," Holmes scoffed, rubbing his knuckles as if he could take the skin off and feel the better for it. "The more fool he."
An outraged exclamation was followed by an indrawn breath, preparatory to harsh, loud words, but Watson shushed Lestrade and said something too low for Holmes to catch. They both fell silent and Holmes took that moment of reprieve to wrest his face back into impassive lines. His stomach remained knotted, however, and he had never wanted his needle so badly as he did in this moment. Watson would call him an idiot and start listing out everything that was wrong with Holmes' use of cocaine, but if there were ever a time for clarity of thought, it was now. There were odd things swimming about in the attic of Holmes' mind, and none of them were relevant to the investigation. Cartright learning letters. Cartright stealing Wiggins' hat and making off with it like a hyena. Cartright with his arm broken from falling off crates at the dock, curled up asleep on a rug before the sitting room fire, the plaster of the cast glowing orange in the darkness. Holmes had stayed in his chair until dawn to make sure he had no urgent needs during the night, and Watson had laughed himself hoarse over it the next morning even as Cartright beamed at Holmes and called Watson a cad with all of the high-pitched indignation that a boy of ten could muster. Cocaine helped Holmes sort through the chaos; it galvanized his mind and made everything brilliant and clear as still waters. He needed focus. He needed to find the men who had dared to lay hands on this boy, and then he needed to murder them in cold blood. He could not do that in his current state.
A dozen deep breaths measured to a ten-count each served to calm a small portion of his mental clamour. Sedate again, at least on the surface, Holmes turned and came back to the autopsy table. Lestrade appeared angry and put off, but he made no comment as Holmes motioned him aside so that he could examine the body. Flinging back the sheet took little effort and he ignored it as it fluttered down to billow in thick folds over Cartright's feet. Holmes could feel two pairs of living eyes watching him, which he resolutely ignored. Lestrade's ire could be heard in the harsh, overly dramatic manner in which he huffed his breath. Watson's displeasure was a less tangible thing, and it irked Holmes to know that it was there. Of all people, Watson knew him best; surely he could not expect Holmes to change from his fundamental self simply on account of one unexpected murder. Holmes was not good at matters of common humanity; he was good at facts, at categorization and deduction. Abandoning his chief tools now would serve nothing, and Cartright would still be dead either way.
The postmortem discoloration and settling of blood had paled the skin of Cartright's chest to an unnatural, almost luminescent grey. Even the place where his ribs had been obviously broken bore little color to evidence the bleeding that had taken place internally. His form was that of a boy on the cusp of manhood, baby fat still holding out in unexpected places like soldiers clinging to a fortress under the final day of a siege, bound to fall and yet resolute in their tenacity to the very last. When Holmes had caught him dipping his grimy fingers into gentlemen's pockets on the Strand, Cartright had been a scrawny, starving, sharp-witted child of eight. He would have reached his sixteenth year in January. He hadn't even any hair on his chest yet.
Holmes picked up the boy's right hand and examined the stains on the fingertips, the state of the cuticles, and the grime beneath the nails. He used a pick to dig some of it out and smeared it between his fingers to release the scent. Unremarkable – the same silt, most likely, that covered the beggar's coat. Next, Holmes tasted it for chemical residue, and again, he detected nothing of consequence. The body had lain here too long, been pawed over by the coroner too many times. He smelled and tasted only antiseptic and the starched soap from the sheet covering him. The body had been washed down after autopsy. Standard procedure.
"No use," Holmes growled, laying the hand back down. "There are no traces left."
"I have the coroner's report here," Lestrade told him, offering a plain brown folder.
"Pah. I have yet to meet a coroner with any true notion of what to look for at autopsy. Watson?" Holmes waved at Watson to take the report instead. While Watson studied the cramped penmanship giving an account of the cause of death and the circumstances leading to it, Holmes looked at Cartright's still face. At some point, his fingers had come to hover near the boy's disordered hair and he smoothed it down without quite meaning to touch it. It was an awkward action, foreign to his hands. He recognized it as patterned on the way that Watson occasionally touched Holmes himself to calm him, or to convey an unspoken emotional message, many of which Holmes failed to identify beyond the general offer of some kind of support or affection. When Watson did such things, it seemed to sooth him as much as Holmes. Holmes felt nothing, doing it to Cartright now. Perhaps he was doing it incorrectly. He pressed his mouth into a grimace and withdrew his hand with a sniff.
Watson stopped speaking abruptly and it was only then, with the break of silence, that Holmes realized there had been words at all. He drew back from the body and looked up. "Go on, Watson."
"Yes, of course." But Watson's gaze lingered for a few more seconds on Holmes, startled enough that it showed on his face and disrupted the even line of his mouth. He shook himself a moment later as if he had just noticed himself staring, and his eyes dropped like leaded weights to the page before him. "I was just listing the injuries. It's nothing that will help us, Holmes; nothing unusual. He put up an impressive fight, but…" Evidently, he could not bring himself to state the obvious, which was that Cartright had been quite brutally beaten before he succumbed. Watson cleared his throat and gently shut the folder. "I'm sorry, Holmes."
"Yes. Well." Holmes peered downward again and Cartright's face blurred out of focus with the relaxation of Holmes' pupils. His eyes burned from fatigue; he had spent several days in lassitude, but none of it had been restful. That was not a property of a cocaine-induced fugue. "I wish to speak to the flower girl who reported the argument between Mister Cartright and the beggar. This is the same girl who also witnessed my own assault?"
Lestrade nodded from off in the corner of Holmes' eye. "Not the beginning, but she saw you come out of the alley after Redding's trio left."
"Hm." Holmes narrowed his eyes touched two fingers to his bottom lip. "You have an address where she may be found?"
"Not…as such," Lestrade stammered. There was no call for such a show of nerves; Holmes was quite calm. They were all of them, quite calm here. "We know the streets she frequents. She's not really what you might call 'tied down'. A strange one, she is. Not quite right in the head."
"The boundaries of her territory, then. And you may wish to look for her yourself, perhaps to remove her to a safer location. If these murders are evidence of a conspiracy, then it would be logical to assume that she may be a target." Holmes drew the sheet up and tucked it beneath Cartright's chin. For some reason, it seemed imperative that he say something, and he found himself murmuring, quite beyond his own cognizance, "There's a good lad," as he patted Cartright's chest through the sheet.
A few seconds later, Watson queried with the utmost neutrality, "Holmes?"
Holmes looked up and smiled, but he could feel it go queer and falter. "Yes, Watson."
Watson turned his face a fraction away, but his eyes remained locked to Holmes' until he was peering sidelong at him. "Don't get lost in there, old man."
"No, of course not." He made the approximate smile again, and through it, confessed, "I am not certain I feel quite well. Perhaps fatigue has caught up with me."
Watson nodded several times, sharp movements highlighted by the lift of his eyebrows, his expression one of dubious incredulity. "I can see that. How about we get you home now. You've been…ill these past few days. No doubt this morning has quite worn your nerves down."
"Yes, that sounds marvelous." Holmes slanted his gaze off to the side and then down again, to Cartright. The smile, mostly sick as it had been, evaporated altogether. He had never explained to Watson that he had only remained in that chair all night because Cartright had feared the shadows with all the vehemence of a child who had never truly felt safe. "He could never abide being alone in the dark." A persistent itch seemed to dance and flicker against his cheek like cobwebs, and Holmes impatiently scratched at it. A moment later, he subsided in favor of frowning down at the tips of his fingers, which had come away slick with wet.
It was Lestrade then, not Watson, who grasped him by the shoulder and turned him away, pressing his scarf into his hands. "Don't you worry about him, Mister Holmes. There's nothing left that can hurt him now. Go on and let Doctor Watson look after you." He gave Holmes a light shove between the shoulder blades to get him moving.
"Come now, Holmes." Watson took the scarf from Holmes' nerveless fingers and tied it about his neck. The he pulled Holmes' arm through his own and tucked it against his body. "Put your hat on."
It was only after Watson had hailed a cab and somehow maneuvered Holmes into it that Holmes had the presence of mind to snap, "It is not immaterial." He said it as if getting in the last word of a heated argument.
Watson looked sharply at him as he sank down to the seat. The hansom lurched into motion and he looked away just as quickly, settling back a bit to consider Holmes' words. Finally, he murmured, his voice scratched the way worn phonographs played crackling old copies of concertos, "I know." Watson reached over and squeezed Holmes' hand, a brief flash of warmth in the gathering dusk. "I do know."
Holmes jerked his head down in a brusque nod. "Good."
Despite the bumpy ride and the chill of the open cab, Holmes nodded off not two blocks from Scotland Yard, slumped into his corner of the compartment with his chin drooping down to rest on his collarbone. Watson watched him openly for once, staring at the gentle curve of an ear partially obscured by a feathering of unkempt hair mashed down beneath the brim of his hat, long overdue for a cutting. Holmes' face was tucked in against his own shoulder, buried in the upturned collar of his greatcoat. He seemed small. Not diminished, but…less, somehow. Or perhaps it was simply how tired he looked, nodding-off aside. Or how much older than he had been a year ago, standing with his arms held wide in Watson's consulting room, smiling and vibrant and miraculously alive.
Watson shook him awake as they came to a halt in front of 221 Baker Street, and Holmes took a groggy look about as Watson climbed down from the hansom. Out of habit, Watson held the folding door, and then had to call to an unmoving Holmes, "The fare, old cock. You've my checkbook, remember? And I haven't any spare change on me today."
Holmes blinked, shivered a bit, and then dug about his pockets until he came up with a few coins, which he passed through the roof hatch to the driver. Then he lit from the cab with very little of his customary grace, and Watson linked their arms together without a word. It had started to snow again, and the cold made Watson's various old injuries throb in time with the pulse of the gusting wind. There were days when he swore that he could actually feel the bits of shrapnel and bullet fragments still embedded deep in his muscles, grinding away against his bones with every flex of his limbs. The sensation was like fingernails to a chalkboard, for all that it was not an audible one.
Mrs Hudson fussed at them as soon as they crossed the threshold, demanding that wet shoes come off and walking sticks get handed over. She fell quiet a moment later, her head tilted to one side as she studied Holmes, who had neither made eye contact nor uttered a word of greeting. Rather than inquiring as to what had happened to send their moods so far afield, she merely asked Watson, "Shall I bring tea?"
"Yes, that would be lovely, Mrs Hudson." Watson smiled as he handed over his hat, then caught at Holmes before he had quite made it to the first stair and gentled him out of his great coat. Holmes allowed this, and relinquished his scarf as well before inclining his head in Mrs Hudson's direction and retreating upstairs in silence, his footfalls muffled on the stairs, save for the one board that creaked.
Mrs Hudson, their outdoor things gathered in a grey and black bundle in her arms, gave Watson a concerned look. "I've a bottle of claret airing in the kitchen, if you think it would do him some good. The grouse is not yet done, though I have some biscuits I could send up with the tea."
"You are a treasure, Mrs Hudson. Biscuits would be lovely." Watson attempted to offer her a warm smile, but he could feel where it petered out midway from his mouth to his eyes. "I am afraid that…well. You remember our fine Mister Cartright?"
Mrs Hudson's lip disappeared between her teeth and she nodded in a knowing fashion. "The lad's dead, isn't he."
Watson began to say something soothing, but he stopped himself at the last moment. "How…has a rumor made its way here, then?"
"No, nothing like that, Doctor. I've just not seen him in days, and the boy is practically a fixture out there." Mrs Hudson lifted her chin to peer up the stairs, toward the empty landing Holmes had just traversed and disappeared from. "Men wear their grief like shields, you know. He loved that boy." She dropped her eyes from the staircase and fixed them sternly on Watson. "Don't let him alone, Doctor. I would feel more secure knowing you were keeping an eye on him tonight."
"I assure you, I have no other intentions this evening."
Mrs Hudson nodded, shifting the garments in her arms. "I'll prepare your tea, then." She began to turn away, hesitated, and then glanced back with her body half angled in the other direction. "If you or Mister Holmes have any needs tonight, I hope you won't hesitate to ask, no matter the hour."
Watson gave a solemn nod, sucking his lips between his teeth as he did so. "Thank you. I should go tend to Holmes. He has not quite recovered from his illness this morning, and the combination of stresses…" He trailed off at the look he received for his lie of civility. Of course, she knew as well as Watson did that Holmes had not been ill, per se, for the past three days.
Her voice stern as befitted a strong woman of her years, Mrs Hudson informed him, "I removed those things from my house while you were out. Every single one of them that I could find, which I suspect is more than you were aware of yourself. He doesn't need it, not the way he uses it. It's not healthy, and I'll not have him poisoning himself under my roof, not anymore. You tell him that from me." Without waiting for an acknowledgement, or even for an argument, Mrs Hudson whirled away in a flurry of skirts, coats, hats and scarves.
Watson stared blankly after her, then coughed and turned to mount the stairs in Holmes' wake. He really ought to stop underestimating Mrs Hudson; she was a formidable woman, despite her age and the smallness of her stature. And she was one of very few people who could get away with doing such a thing. Anyone else, Holmes would tear apart with his words and then openly thwart with as much malicious intent as he could mange. Mrs Hudson would earn a tantrum and a bit of yelling, but Holmes would never dare defy her, not concerning the activities that she would or would not permit in her house. And even the tantrum would be smoothed over a few days or weeks later, via the convenient medium of flowers or a new hat and gloves left surreptitiously in front of her sitting room door. Holmes may have had many distasteful moods and eccentricities, but he was always a gentleman. Eventually.
The sitting room was empty when Watson stepped inside, but there was evidence of Holmes' progress across the room in the form of his shoes lying several feet apart in the middle of the floor, no doubt toed off as he walked, and in the disarray of the mantle, which Watson had straightened just this morning. There was tobacco strewn all over the hearth, the Persian slipper was empty, and an old black clay pipe was missing from Holmes' rack.
Watson sighed and at least picked up the shoes so that neither of them would trip over them. "Holmes, if you're of a mind to waste tobacco, at least warn me so that I can make sure to hide my own." No answer was forthcoming, so Watson made his way to the open door to Holmes' faint trail of pipe smoke wafting past doorway gave him away.
Inside, Holmes stood glaring at his shaving table, nearly every one of his inhalations coming through the stem of the pipe clamped tight between his lips. His things had clearly been pawed through, and Mrs Hudson, occasionally vindictive lady that she was, had left the empty morocco case sitting out in plain sight where Holmes could not but see it immediately. A row of empty test tubes, scrubbed clean with their stoppers lined up beneath them, accompanied the absent needle. There were seven of them. It was a very clear message, and Watson wondered how many broken teacups and appropriated soup spoons she would suffer for having the gall to deliver it.
"Holmes? Tell me what you need, old boy."
To Watson's surprise, Holmes startled at the sound of his voice and nearly dropped his pipe. "Watson," he gusted, eyes wide, and then he frowned, his gaze refocusing over Watson's shoulder. He seemed to pale, but it could have been a trick of the light; Holmes had little color in his face to begin with.
Puzzled, Watson craned his neck past his own shoulder and followed Holmes' gaze to the collection of portraits decorating the bedroom wall. Macabre pieces, all of them – serial killers and other infamous criminals. When Watson had first taken rooms here, he had been appalled by the sight of this display; it had seemed to him at first glance that Holmes glorified these criminals the way other men did when they kept portraits of ancestors and war heroes. In fact, he was still not entirely certain that this wasn't the case. Watson was only immune to the sight now because he rarely looked at that wall. He suppressed the urge to either grimace or shiver, and merely remarked, "I think I liked Palmer better in the corner, where I could barely see him."
An odd sound drew Watson's attention back to Holmes, who had left off staring at the wall and was now fixated on Watson with a most disconcerting expression. "What?"
"William Palmer," Watson repeated more sharply than he had intended, waving his hand toward the portrait in question. "Serial poisoner? I have always found him more disturbing to look at than the others, but as he was mostly obscured in the shadow of the wardrobe, I hardly noticed him. You've switched him with the Mannings."
Holmes just…stared at him, and for a very long moment. Then he shifted his gaze to the portraits again, and Watson imagined that he could feel a knot of pressurized air lift from him and move to hover above the dresser.
"Holmes?"
"I have not rearranged the portraits," Holmes stated, his voice clipped. "I am aware of your dislike for Palmer's face; that is why he was relegated to the corner in the first place."
Watson frowned, then passed a hand across his eyes and shook his head. "Mrs Hudson must have moved them, then. Or the maid."
"Mrs Hudson would not dare!" Holmes snapped.
Watson shut his eyes briefly, one hand raised in the hopes of warding off further outbursts. The weariness he felt in dealing with Holmes' mood startled him with its intensity, but then again, it had been a very trying day for both of them. "It was likely an accident, then. Perhaps they were knocked off the wall and she replaced them in the wrong configuration. I am certain that it was not malicious."
With a snort, Holmes shoved past him and snatched the Mannings' portrait from the wall, followed by the one of Palmer. Both were subjected to a fierce scrutiny. "Neither frame shows evidence of having fallen – there are no scratches, no dents, no broken or scored glass. And how would they have been knocked aside in the first place, I ask you? This side of the room has not been tidied, and the only reason to touch portraits anyway would be to dust them – " He broke off with a heavy frown, angling the frames so that he could peer along the surface of the glass of each. Then he turned to regard the rest of his gruesome collection, arrayed across the wall in front of them. "There is dust on all of those, a thick layer, undisturbed." He held up the two frames in his hands. "And these have been wiped clean."
Watson blinked, nonplussed, and then said, "Surely you are not suggesting that someone broke into our rooms for the sole purpose of rearranging your wall pictures."
A tiny furrow appeared on Holmes brow, and he ducked his head to look again at the frames in his hands. A formless worry worked its way onto Holmes' features, faint but unmistakable, and then he straightened with a scowl. "Of course not. Don't be absurd." He flung the portraits on top of the rest of the clutter littering the surface of his dresser, and then stormed out into the sitting room.
Watson bit his lip, staring at the discarded portraits, and then he took a deep breath and followed after Holmes. "We need to have a discussion," he announced.
Holmes paused in his pacing and plucked the pipe from between his lips. "About what, pray tell?"
He did not want to say this. Truly, Watson would have preferred to simply ignore the whole thing and carry on.
On the other side of the room, Holmes shifted to stand languidly with one hip cocked and the hand not holding his pipe stuffed into his pocket. This was not an easy stance; it was the one Holmes adopted when suspicious of those in his company. He was a predator like this, more so than any of the men on his bedroom wall could have ever hoped to be. None of that was apparent in his tone, however, when he encouraged, "Go on, my dear Watson. I assure you, it will be better to have it out in the open now."
It occurred to Watson that Holmes expected him to confess to moving the portraits. Why on earth Holmes would think that of him was beyond Watson. Watson sighed, shaking his head in surrender without meaning to give Holmes that impression. "I think that we need to talk about the invisible men."
Stillness such as that which followed this pronouncement should be lethal for the sharpness of its edges. And then Holmes took a shaking step in his direction, livid just to look at, and hissed, "What do you know of them?"
Watson swallowed an unexpected knot of apprehension. It was unwise to confront a volatile man, especially considering that Holmes had become violent with him once before over this business. "Mycroft told me about your mother's…condition. About the death of your father. You…said some things to him when he collected you from Lestrade's office. He was understandably concerned about you."
Neither of them moved or reacted right away, and yet the distance between them – the mere width of the sitting room – seemed to grow as Holmes digested and then analyzed this new information. Holmes eventually broke eye contact and stepped back, withdrawing into the folding of his shoulders and the casting aside of his posture. There was no anger there, no betrayal, no sense of anything at all. "Get out," he said. The flat, unadorned quality of his voice, the casual steadiness, belied the rest of his affect, which was slamming shut right there in Watson's face as Holmes turned his back and ran the stem of his pipe over his bottom lip. "Now."
"Holmes – "
"He told you this in the Stranger's Room," Holmes stated, but the deduction came in a deadened manner, as if it were nearly beyond Holmes to care about it anymore. "That is why you wanted the membership roles for the club. You knew that he had been there, didn't you." It was not a question.
Watson opened his mouth but found no words. His feet brought him a step forward, however. "No, I did not know," he denied. "Not for certain." And of course Holmes knew what he and Mycroft had argued about; the man could read lips with the same ease as ciphers. "I knew that something had happened, that someone had been there – "
"He told me that he was an invisible man," Holmes interrupted, his voice still frightening in its softness, its calm.
Watson nodded. "So you implied at the time."
"I could not imagine how anyone could know about them, so I took the whole thing for an hallucination. And you let me."
Watson swallowed, but there was tightness in his throat and chest that should not have been there, and it would not depart. "He must have eavesdropped on our conversation. The door was closed, but we hardly took precautions other than that." Again, Watson moved to swallow, but his adam's apple got in the way this time and prevented it. "Holmes, will you look at me?"
A mirthless huff sounded from behind the pipe stem and Holmes lowered his head over it. Smoke puffed up around his head a moment later. He ignored Watson's plea. "Tell me, Doctor. Just now, when you brought this up, were you about to accuse me of paranoia? Tell me that like my mother, I was seeing evidence of trespass that was not there?"
He was tempted to lie – it may even have been the right thing to do – but he had promised not four days ago to never do so to Holmes again. "It had crossed my mind. The alternative is…fantastic." That someone had orchestrated this – was doing this intentionally to make Holmes appear a madman, or to think himself one.
"Is it?" Holmes mused. "Hm. I suppose it must be."
Watson ventured another step closer, but he was still well beyond arm's reach. "Will you tell me what happened in that room? What he said to you, what…what he did?"
"Why?" Holmes shrugged, and Watson wished that he could see Holmes' face. "It hardly matters. The motive matters, the goal. Everything else is a distraction."
Watson felt compelled to add, "If it was real."
Holmes chuckled, and it was truly an ugly sound. "Yes, indeed, Watson. Good form."
Watson dropped his eyes, sick at himself for his own honesty. Finally, all he could really do was aver, "I want to believe you, Holmes. I swear to god, I do."
"But you are a medical man," Holmes replied. "And I have always been slightly mad. One cannot ignore precedents."
"That is not what I meant."
Holmes responded with a disinterested grunt and arranged himself in the frame of the window overlooking Baker Street. "I believe I asked you to leave."
Watson shook his head. "No. I am not leaving you alone in here, Holmes. If he has been here, if he has found his way into our home – "
"Stop being tedious. You may as well go. As you said, the alternative is fantastic."
"That does not mean it's untrue. Look at the cases we have worked, Holmes. Many of those were fantastic too." Watson felt his brow creasing, his mouth twisting his mustache into an unnatural shape. "You don't seriously mean to say that you actually believe – "
"Even I cannot argue with fact," Holmes interjected, and finally, there was a hint of feeling to his voice – a touch of anger. "I am bombarded by facts, Watson. Tell me, how else are they to be read?"
Watson bristled, a sensation that he felt acutely all over his body. His hands balled into fists, he strode to the sitting room door and bellowed for Mrs Hudson in a manner normally reserved for Holmes. She appeared at the landing, with a tea tray, muttering under her breath and glaring at him for his impatience. Watson stepped aside to allow her entrance to the sitting room, then blocked the way out after she deposited the tea tray on the sideboard. "Mrs Hudson, did you touch any of the portraits on Holmes' bedroom walls?"
Mrs Hudson drew herself up, indignant. "I told you what I touched," she snapped back.
"Yes or no, Mrs Hudson," Watson pressed. He should have felt a cad for bullying a woman in such a manner, and yet he only felt desperate. "Did you move his portraits?"
"I don't even look at the ghastly things," Mrs Hudson told him. "And unless you want your supper served to you black and crisped, I suggest you to step aside."
Watson stood his ground; this was more important that the state of his dinner. "Did the maid enter these rooms at all?"
"Certainly not! Do you think that I would subject any poor girl to the – the state that you two leave this place in? And before you ask, no, there were no callers today, and no guests in the house." She flapped her hand at him and Watson automatically sidestepped, watching her retreat in a fluster of raised hackles and dark looks. "Honestly!" she muttered from halfway down the stairs. "The nerve."
Watson closed the door, overly gentle, and released the doorknob only after long deliberation. Someone had rearranged the portraits, and it had not been one of the four people who were supposed to be in this house. Someone had been here, unseen, just as someone had been in the room at the Diogenes Club. A witness was dead, as was the young man who had tried to save him. It hardly mattered if these events had been perpetrated by a fourth assailant from the original assault, or by some other man for some other purpose. It only mattered that in this house, in this room, they were not safe. Holmes was not safe.
Watson looked up to find Holmes watching him, expressionless. After inhaling more shallowly than he liked, Watson said, "Tell me what happened at the Diogenes Club."
It took nearly a minute of them regarding each other with ambiguous expressions from opposite sides of the room. And then finally, Holmes sagged against the window frame, his hand falling nerveless to his side with the pipe dangling between his fingers. Ash fell in a thin billowing line to the carpet and smoldered for a moment before going dark. "All right."
He only frightened him.
Watson folded his jacket and placed it in the wardrobe, fairly chanting that inside his head. It's alright; he only frightened him; nothing more... Behind him, Holmes already sat propped against the headboard, a tea saucer in his lap for an ashtray. They were in Watson's room on the second floor, the window secured and braced shut with the aid of two canes, and the door locked with a chair shoved beneath the handle. It was very probable that the two of them would suffocate of smoke inhalation long before dawn, judging by the rate at which Holmes was fouling the air, and yet Watson did not even contemplate opening the window.
The incident at the club had not been as bad as Watson had feared. The man had touched Holmes indecently, but had not progressed beyond fondling through clothes; Holmes had passed out too quickly for that, though he could not tell Watson for certain whether he had stopped breathing due to fear, or because the man had actively cut off his air to render him insensible. He had still been under the influence of brandy and chloral, probably administered to excess, in Watson's opinion, by a physician with too heavy a hand for these things. In any case, Holmes admitted to the addling of his senses, and while Watson was now convinced of some larger conspiracy, Holmes himself…was not. He would not let go of the possibility that the majority of the event had been a drug-induced illusion or a waking hallucination. It was unsettling, and Watson found himself in desperate need of something or someone to hate for this state of affairs.
Watson set about unbuttoning his cuffs, and then his shirt, his eyes trained on the work of his fingers. "Alright. We will be taking certain precautions starting tonight, and I am telling you now that they are not negotiable."
The bed frame creaked as Holmes shifted. "Has it occurred to you, Watson, that you may be taking things a bit far?"
Watson slammed his open palm into the surface of his dresser, upsetting a bottle of cologne and causing the cufflinks in the dish beside it to dance. "He was in our home - for god's sake, Holmes, he was in your bedroom! There is no possible way for me to take this too far!" His other hand came to rest on the dresser as well, bracing him upright as he fought to control his breathing, but he was not certain that it would be enough. "Holmes, you don't…understand, you… He touched you – he was right there, and I wasn't…and I…you are supposed to be safe, I am supposed to see to that, and I cannot let him near you again. Holmes, I can't risk it."
Just as his knees began to buckle and a shameful, frantic bubble burst in his chest, Watson heard Holmes moving about behind him. A hurried pattering of bare feet punctuated the smoke-filled air, and then Holmes grasped him about the chest to keep him on his feet. "Easy, now, Watson. Just breathe for a moment."
Watson leaned back against Holmes, grateful for the support, and dug his fingernails into the smooth wood beneath his hands. He knew this feeling, but it had been over a decade since he last felt it. Wild reaction and panic and dwindling control, but instead of the deafening roar of gunfire and the screams of dying men, Watson heard Holmes telling him about rent money and the ruined shirt and how he hadn't understood what they meant to do to him.
Holmes murmured nonsense in his ear, the same sorts of things he had whispered all of those years ago when he first noticed that Watson occasionally suffered from nervous spells brought on by his service during the war. It wasn't helping, though; Holmes' gentle voice was not making its way intact to Watson. There were unnatural gaps between words where the reassurances faded out, and the sentences slithered and changed as they reached Watson's ears. I couldn't let you find my body. And, There were forty two buttons; I marked it. But not Fourth Man's buttons. Maybe he just hadn't had any buttons. Not everyone's clothes had buttons.
"You will work yourself into a state," Holmes cautioned. "Do try to calm yourself, Watson. Shall I fetch you a brandy? You must tell me what you need. I cannot help if I don't know what you need of me."
"I told you," Watson gasped, choking on his own bile and rage. "It's just like a war. It's a warzone. Everywhere. And you're not safe. I have to keep you safe, I have to!" He shouted this last, and Holmes' grip tightened about his ribs, hands splayed over Watson's sternum and diaphragm.
"I know," Holmes murmured. "I know, John."
Watson shook, his own feet threatening to skitter out from under him as he twisted, pushing away from the dresser with his arms to increase the force of their bodies pressing together, to make Holmes seem more solid against him. "You don't know!" he countered, and there was such fury in him that he felt certain his heart would burst with it. "You weren't here – you have no fucking idea what it was like to lose you!"
Holmes ticked in response, and then he whispered, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll do whatever you want – any precautions – I swear, just please stop this."
Watson tipped his head back, trying to loosen the knot in his chest so that he could breathe. Behind him, Holmes reset his weight so that they didn't fall, and Watson finally – finally, after a year of ignoring this thing lying between them, of pretending that everything was fine, that Reichenbach was just another stunt, that he wasn't terrified of losing this all over again – finally, Watson got his feet steady, turned around, and punched Holmes in the face. Then he grabbed him like a lifeline before Holmes could so much as stagger from the blow, and refused to let him go.
Watson hadn't cried before. He hadn't grieved, no matter what Holmes thought. The stories he had published over the course of those three years had not been a eulogy. In fact, Watson had not dealt with Reichenbach at all. He had shoved it into a little box in his mind and built walls around it, sentries posted at every access point, and he had left it there, undisturbed. And he had scribbled out his stories to relive them because as long as there were still more stories to write, there was no ending to speak of. Holmes had come back to him before all of the stories had run out, yes, but that earlier pain had not dissipated. He had believed his dearest friend dead for three years, and the need to mourn that was not going to go away simply because Holmes was miraculously alive again.
"It could have been you," Watson gurgled. He did not recall either of them sliding to the floor, but they had, and Holmes was trying to wrap himself around Watson as if to better hold his pieces together. "He could have killed you instead of Cartright." It was a horrid thing to say, and yet he did not regret saying it. It could have been Holmes in that morgue today, dead by any one of a hundred means. It could have been Holmes dead on the floor of his own bedroom, blood saturated with an excess of cocaine. Dead in any one of those thousands of moments when Watson was not beside him, was not with him, could not save him.
Holmes said nothing, his hand going still where it had been rubbing circles into Watson's back. He resumed a moment later, tucking his nose in against Watson's ear. "I know," he breathed. It seemed the only possible response – just an acknowledgement that what Watson said was true. "Please stop. I've promised to do whatever you like. Please, Watson."
"I can't go through that again," Watson told him. "I need you here with me, Holmes, I need you here safe, I need you."
"That's enough," Holmes soothed, awkward in his attempt to comfort. "Look here, now, Watson – I'm fine. And you're fine. And there's no cause for this, so stop it now." His words were harsh, but the tone was not. And contrary to his admonitions, Holmes gathered Watson closer and began to rock them both back and forth. Maybe it was natural, and maybe he was just emulating what he had seen others do. It didn't matter which. Watson sank into him and buried himself in the collar of Holmes' dressing gown, fully aware of the indecent sight they made tangled together on the floor, one of them in his nightclothes and the other half undressed.
Watson breathed in tatters and wet coughs, clinging like a limpet until he heard himself saying, over and over, "You can't die again, you can't, I won't let you…" and made himself stop.
Holmes had fallen silent by now, still rocking, though more gently. When Watson risked opening his eyes to get a look at just how much of a mess he had made of them both, he found Holmes staring forward with a pensive, troubled pall to his features. Eventually, his eyelids flickered and he noticed Watson's regard. He didn't say anything though, and he didn't smile or soften his features or try to smooth any of this over. He merely looked at Watson for a little while, and then he looked away at something else again.
They remained there until Watson's breathing returned to normal, and then helped each other up without a word. Holmes resumed his place propped against the headboard and lit a fresh cigarette, and Watson finished dressing for bed. The silence was awkward, but not due to embarrassment, at least not on Watson's end. He was not entirely certain what had just happened, or what sorts of consequences there would be for it. It seemed to have affected Holmes on some level normally unattained by emotional displays, and though their gazes did not meet, Watson was aware of Holmes casting him wary, appraising looks as Watson bustled about the room completing his nightly routine.
Before he blew out the candle on his table, Watson offered Holmes a cold, damp towel for the knuckle-shaped bruise blossoming on his right cheekbone. Then Watson sat on the edge of the mattress to kick off his slippers. He remained there afterwards with his bare toes furling into the little rug beneath his feet. There were malformed sentiments swimming about the back of his mind, and he knew that they would not quiet until he had them out.
Behind him, Holmes stubbed out his cigarette and set the saucer on the nightstand. "Watson? I believe I owe you an apology, though I am not quite certain what I have done to so upset you."
Watson ignored him, just existing there with him for a short time. Then he said, his voice threaded through like that of a consumptive breathing through the fluid filling his own lungs, "Whether he is real or not, I will not let him have you." The unsteady nature of his words seemed to lend them a gravity and a force that a calmer, more measured delivery could not have accomplished. "Do you understand, Holmes? He'll not have you, and that's the end of it."
Long fingers curled over the tip of Watson's shoulder and tugged him back to lie down in the narrow bed. The candle went out and darkness settled around them. "Go to sleep now, dear fellow. We can talk about your precautions in the morning."
Watson caught at the hand on his shoulder before it could slip away, and pulled. When Watson finally fell asleep, it was to the stale tang of tobacco smoke hovering still in the air, and to Sherlock Holmes curled around him like a blanket – a warm, living presence at his back.
~TBC~