Distractions

by fourleggedfish

For a prompt on LiveJournal: Holmes being the victim of rape with Watson finding out and as usual having to deal with the aftermath. EXPLICIT non-con, violence, NC-17. May be triggering. There is plot involved yes, that's also a warning .

14. Chapter 14

I know that many of you have despaired of ever seeing another update to this story. I assure you that I have despaired of that as well. It has turned out to be far more difficult to be in this fic than I thought it would be, if you know what I mean, as the author. I hope that I can hold the feel of it here and keep going without such a long break again, but in all fairness, I offer no promises, and I do apologize for that. This fic is my cocaine. I want to indulge in a binge of it as much as I feel I should give it up for the sake of my health sometimes, but I hate leaving things unfinished, and I realized as I looked at my fic portfolio that I have left quite a few fics unfinished. So...here is a long awaited update, and a long overdue apology, and I hope that both of them make your days just a little bit brighter. :)

Chapter 14:

Justice Hall, housing the Central Criminal Court, could never have been described as quiet, and yet it struck Watson as subdued that morning. Even as he and Holmes wound their way past the crowd loitering in the public areas, the bustle calmed and seemed to muffle itself, sound and industry smothered beneath the essential weight of its own importance. Weary barristers and blank-faced public servants moved about with expressions that battled, in varying degrees, to avoid falling into lines of resignation at the perpetual filth of society. Men fooled themselves into thinking humanity to be civilized, when at times it seemed that all they had managed to accomplish with modern industrialization was to dress baboons in a parade of finery.

Holmes appeared to take no notice of the hush that followed them along the hall and broke in their wakes, but then, his ignorance was most assuredly an affectation. Watson observed the tightening of the small muscles of Holmes' jaw and the way that his shoulders rose with the stiffness imbued into his posture by the harried atmosphere and what must have been Holmes' own discomfiture. Watson tread with a purpose in Holmes' shadow as they made their way along the halls of the Old Bailey.

"We don't have to do this, you know."

Holmes paused in mid-step and then pivoted partway around to glare at Watson sidelong. "Unless my memory escapes me, we have been over this already."

"Yes," Watson agreed. They had been over it at length, most notably while Watson watched Holmes try to don his cravat with fingers that shook so badly he nearly stuck himself with his own tie pin. Whether it had been nerves alone, or an exacerbation of the aftermath of cocaine, Watson did not know. "I simply wish to reiterate – "

"You may save your breath," Holmes interrupted, and then his stance shifted with a subtle abruptness. He fidgeted his fingertips together at the height of his navel, an uncertain gesture wholly out of character for him. "However, I understand that the thought of the coming proceedings may cause you discomfort, in which event I would not insist that you accompany me further. We can meet across the street afterwards for tea or…no, just tea. You don't like their food offerings."

Watson heaved a breath in through his nose, grimacing as he did so, though he hoped that his mustache concealed all but the minute lift of one edge of his lip. "Don't be ridiculous," he scoffed. "Tea. Really, Holmes." He dragged his glove from one hand and gestured down the hall with it before stuffing it into the pocket of his greatcoat. "On we go, then."

Holmes would never have admitted to feeling the relief that broke so clearly over his face for a mere fraction of a second, but Watson saw it in that fleeting instant before Holmes buried it again with an ease that betrayed the long practice he had of doing it. Watson saw all sorts of things in those precious instants when Holmes' humanity showed in fits and sparks from between the cracks in his cold and haughty affectations. Armor of a sort, perhaps, though it often seemed ineffective to Watson's eyes. It fooled most others well enough, however, and perhaps that was all that Holmes meant for it to do.

The din died down the closer they got to the courtroom, which made Lestrade's calling out to them all the more jarring when the sound of it rang from behind them. In typical fashion, Holmes ignored him, his attention seized upon the court docket left lying unattended on a nearby desk. Watson watched him frown as he paged through it, thought briefly about stopping him, and then left him to it. Lestrade's behavior was far more interesting, his footsteps rushed and his manner almost furtive. It spoke ill to Watson's continuing sense of unease this morning.

As soon as Lestrade had drawn close enough for civil conversation, Watson dipped his head and greeted, "Inspector."

Lestrade waved off the pleasantry. "With me, gentlemen, if you please. And be quick about it." He motioned them to follow him away from the courtroom, down a side corridor and into a small, spartan deliberating chamber.

Watson paused long enough to be certain of Holmes following, and then preceded both men into the room. Lestrade shut the door behind them and then leaned back against it, his eyes downcast. Everything about his bearing screamed of reluctance with an added sneer of distaste. Impatient now, and growing increasingly restless with worry, Watson snapped, "What is it, Inspector?"

At some point, Holmes had moved into the far corner of the room as if to study the joints of the floor molding. Watson only noticed this when Holmes turned to pad softly around the table in the center of the room. Without looking at either of them, he announced, "There is a problem with the trial." Holmes glanced at Lestrade's averted face from under the fringe of hair that had fallen over his own brow. Just as quickly, his gaze skittered away again, and the calm timber of his voice, while genuine, seemed to herald something other than a sanguine temper. "The case has been removed from today's court docket. Do be kind enough, Inspector, to give us the courtesy of an explanation."

Lestrade nodded, but he took a moment to continue biting something – his tongue, the inside of his cheek perhaps – before he looked up. "Mister Holmes, I had no choice."

Watson was striding forward before he even registered his intention to crowd the poor man as if to bully a better explanation from him. It was only Holmes' stepping between them, his hand held up with perfect equanimity in a stilling gesture, that caused him to subside against the threat of anger crawling through his blood. It could not still his voice, however. "What in bloody hell is that supposed to mean?" he demanded. "You have them – you have confessions, for Pete's sake! What could possibly have gone wrong?"

"Watson."

Watson ticked and looked at Holmes, clenched his fist to ground himself, and then spun away for fear that looking at Lestrade any longer would cause him to start casting unwarranted aspersions on the whole of Scotland Yard the way that Holmes tended to do in his fits of black temper.

A sound of shuffling feet reached Watson's ears and he shook his head, one hand rubbing at the bridge of his nose as Lestrade spoke again. "We do have confessions, and that's half the problem. Redding's confession reads like a gutter tale out of Cleveland Street. And he swore that if we put him up in the booth on a charge of willful sodomy without consent… God, I can't believe I'm even saying this."

His tone softer than his words suggested, Holmes said, "Spit it out, man."

Lestrade sighed. "His confession makes it sound consensual. He kept on with his – his filth, like he was doing when we arrested him. He swore he'd take that to the bench with him, Mister Holmes."

Watson scrubbed a hand back through his hair, disbelieving, and gripped the brim of his hat hard enough to bend it out of shape. "Holmes was attacked," he nearly shouted.

"Yes," Lestrade agreed. "But for god's sake…if it comes before a jury the way Redding's telling it…"

"We have evidence," Watson insisted, but he could feel a tiny thread of panic working its way through his abdomen, spurred on by Holmes' conspicuous silence. "You have my medical report, as well as stolen goods – "

"A pocket watch, only, which was found on Redding's person," Lestrade interrupted. "Nothing else. The cigar case was not found on any of the three perpetrators, and it cannot be traced back to them. One witness is dead, and the other…we cannot locate her. We have only Holmes' word, and that would be suspect in this."

Watson shook his head and turned around, though he kept his distance from Lestrade this time, as if the man were contagious in some fashion. "No. No – "

Lestrade simply went on talking, inexorable. "The men did not rob Mister Holmes of the large sum of money he was carrying on his person, as Mister Holmes himself attests. The theft of the pocket watch is genuine, but not compelling. Redding has not deviated from his version of events, grotesque as they are. He will insist that the encounter was consensual, on the official court record, and then I would have no choice but to arrest Mister Holmes on suspicion of gross indecency, and conduct an investigation into both of your lives. And neither of your characters would hold up under that."

Watson could feel the flush of fury reddening his cheeks. "I beg your pardon."

Finally – finally – Lestrade looked up, first at Holmes, who appeared to no longer be paying attention, and then at Watson. "I would be forced to investigate his personal life. Your personal life. Your living situation is common knowledge: two bachelors, one never married and openly scornful toward women, the other only briefly wedded to a sickly wife who soon perished, hardly worth mentioning even as a beard."

Watson bit his tongue at the mention of his unfortunate Mary; she was not a part of this, may God rest her.

"There have always been whispers about the two of you, though nothing has yet come of any of it, but if we call Redding's bluff… Both Clarkey and I know that you share sleeping accommodations, that you are intimate with each other in a manner that goes beyond that of mere acquaintanceship, whether or not that manner is…is carnal. And the exact manner of it would be irrelevant the moment it came to light that you sleep together in one bed in spite of having a second furnished bedroom. The law is not forgiving in this. Even if you and Mister Holmes never actually committed an indecent act together, conspiracy charges could still apply, and your lifestyles do nothing to disprove it. In fact, the way you comport yourselves in front of your peers would only serve to support a conspiracy charge. And even if the charges did not stick – and I would hold little hope for that with the number of enemies you have, Mister Holmes – your reputations would both be in shambles by the end of the thing." Lestrade swallowed and glanced off into the distance as if he could see it in front of himself. "You would both be ruined."

Watson felt sick. They only shared a bed because of him. Because of Watson's fear that he might wake up and find Holmes' return to be nothing more than a figment conjured by his lonely mind. Or because of the fear that something might happen to Holmes in the dead of night, and that Watson would not know of it until morning, when it was too late.

From somewhere along the opposite side of the table came the hesitant sound of Holmes clearing his throat. "But you said that wouldn't happen."

When Watson looked over, he found Holmes staring straight at him, eyes wide and bright and suddenly, frightfully empty of that ineffable quality that had always, previously, defined Holmes.

"It shouldn't have," Lestrade offered, his posture apologetic, perhaps even slightly ashamed. "But the scandal… Mister Holmes, there would be no stopping it. I know that this is a ghastly outcome, but it isn't worth that."

Only Holmes' eyes moved to Lestrade in response to his words; the rest of his body remained fixed in the rigid tableau of a casual gentleman. His words sharper, accusing as his face darkened a fraction, Holmes told Lestrade, "You promised. You said I'm not Oscar Wilde. You know what happened!"

With a queasy tilt to his body, Lestrade appeared to be trying to shake his head and nod it at the same time. "I know. God help me, Mister Holmes, but it wouldn't stand up in court. They'd take you to pieces."

"Circumstantial evidence at best, and they committed prior attacks of this nature – there is an established pattern – "

"Circumstantial evidence is enough," Lestrade cut in. "Labouchere's Amendment to the Criminal Law Act of 1885 is intentionally vague; there's a low enough standard of evidence that even suggesting that you had once thought about committing an indecent act upon another man would be enough for a conspiracy conviction. You live alone as a confirmed bachelor with another unmarried man, a man with whom you share a bed, whose courtship of a lady you publicly disparaged. You yourself have publicly and forcefully asserted that you have no interest in the fairer sex, see no merit in marriage or the fathering of children, and have never been seen to be in the graces of a lady – or even to notice feminine charms at all, another fact of which your biographer has been quite clear in his writings of you."

"You will not use the Doctor's livelihood against him – you will not disparage his scribblings – "

"I disparage nothing!" Lestrade snapped, his temper unraveling quite out of character. "But they will!" His fingers jabbed in the vague direction of the court room. "What evidence do you have to refute a claim that you have at least considered the merits of your own sex, Mister Holmes? And in light of this, in light of your lifestyle and your habits and your unnatural closeness to Doctor Watson – "

Holmes twitched and snarled, "It is not unnatural to have a friend – "

" – he is not just a friend to you!" Lestrade shouted over him. "He is the only acquaintance you allow yourself at all, and that is telling, which is exactly what a jury will see in it!"

Holmes' breathing became tetchy, as if he made multiple attempts to start a rebuttal and fell hoarse at each one. Finally, Watson watched him tremble a bit, and then merely yell, "No!" at Lestrade's face as if that alone were a cogent argument.

Lestrade appeared none too collected himself, and he nodded in reply. "I know," he told Holmes, and from his tone, he truly did. "But if Redding makes good on that threat – and there is no reason for him not to – I cannot disprove it. Everything he will say about you, every doubt he will cast on your character, every trumped-up claim he will make about the incident, every…the way you called for Doctor Watson throughout the entire affair – "

Holmes winced and blinked several times at the floor, shaking his head to negate the whole of what Lestrade persisted in trying to imply.

Into this, Lestrade's frustration and revulsion at his own words came through clear and unambiguous. "I know why you did – I understand that it wasn't perversion that had you saying his name, but I cannot prove that Redding is not right. I cannot prove it. The burden of evidence in this, in a claim of this sort…it's on you to show innocence, not on him or the crown to prove guilt."

Watson felt his nostrils flair as he demanded, "How, exactly, is a man expected to prove the substance of his own thoughts? This is a farce, Lestrade!"

"They have a pattern," Holmes repeated, but there was a desperation to it that Watson had scarce ever heard from him before. "They perpetrated other attacks of the same nature, in the same manner, often enough to argue over whose turn it was. You can prove their nature – they are predators."

"I cannot," Lestrade whispered. A bit louder, he explained, "I've told you, the other victims won't come forward. They are inverts. They would be exposed to prosecution themselves if they pressed charges, and that wouldn't help you anyway. All it would prove is that Redding's gang stuck fast to a pattern of preying on inverts. And in the course of it, they preyed on you."

The room fell silent save for Holmes' erratic breathing and the rustle of cloth which betrayed the unsteadiness of each of the three of them. Watson looked up and searched the room for Holmes' profile as if he didn't already know exactly where he stood, as if he weren't always perfectly aware of Holmes' position relative to his own in a room. Holmes continued to stare at Lestrade as if to compel him to pronounce this all a horrible joke, as if he could make it so by glaring long and hard enough. His hands continued to shake from the chemicals with which he had so recently abused himself, and his eyes, rimmed in red, gave him a mildly demented air.

For his part, Lestrade would not meet either of their gazes. "I know it's blackmail," Lestrade announced to the room in general. "Redding is blackmailing you…us…to get off an indecency and assault charge, but his recorded statement and confession support the fiction he is threatening to tell, so I cannot prove that either. Were this the 80's, I would tell you to take your chances, that the odds of a conviction for such a thing were laughable, but with the current political climate – the Wilde trial and the morality movement gaining a hold in London – you would be just another example to make, no matter the truth of the affair."

Holmes' stare broke with a sharp blink and a twist on one foot as he rebalanced himself where he stood. He licked his lips, and then ventured, "You can't…let him go, you can't."

Lestrade's eyes slid shut, a man surrendering to the enemy laying siege at his gate. "Redding had your pocket watch on his person, and he confessed to taking it from you without permission. That is a petty theft, but a crime all the same. It carries a sentence of two months in gaol at most, and that depends on the judgement of the magistrate. As for Williams and Kirkpatrick… Without the assault and gross indecency charges for the…for what they did, we don't have anything on which to hold them. They are not even accessories to the theft; Redding claimed that solely for his own."

The shadows in the room seemed to flicker and move in conjunction with Holmes' increasing, silent agitation. The jitter and shake proceeding from blood starved of an excess of cocaine intensified enough that Watson could see him shivering and twitching his fingers hard against his leg. His eyes remained nowhere for more than a heartbeat, and indeed seemed not to fix on anything presently in the room with them.

"I am so sorry," Lestrade breathed. He appeared just as sick at the situation as Watson felt. "I don't know what else to do, Mister Holmes. If it were anyone else, I would be calling on you for help."

Watson felt his chest jerk as if he had momentarily been drowning in the open air. It served to spur him to action. Ignoring Lestrade, he made a physical effort to gather himself together and then strode to Holmes with a purpose. "Come." Watson hooked his hand in Holmes' elbow and tugged at him perhaps more sharply than he should have. "Come, Holmes. There is no purpose in our staying here any longer."

Holmes seemed to sink in on himself, his legs wobbling beneath the negligible weight of his own bearing, bringing them both up short with a stumble. "Watson…" His voice had turned thick with something best left to the corner by the fireplace in their sitting room months' past where the stench of rot and filth had lingered on Holmes' skin and soiled clothing, and Watson had crushed him to his chest to keep his pieces together in the dark.

"Pull yourself together," Watson mumbled, shoving Holmes in a manner sufficient to keep him upright. He elbowed his way around Lestrade to the door, tucked Holmes' arm into and around his own the way they tended to do on springtime walks in Regent's Park, and dragged him out into the corridor. Lestrade made no move to follow them.

The cold winter air slapped them in the face as they exited the courthouse and made for the main road, Watson towing Holmes along in his wake like a moth on a string and into the first cab sat waiting at the curb. The whole ride back to Baker Street, Holmes vibrated with ambiguous purpose on the bench next to him, silent as a violin string pitched high enough that only dogs could hear it in the bare instant before it snapped from the unsustainable tension. Watson did not know quite how Holmes managed to contain himself in such utter silence and outward composure throughout the cab ride and their entrance at Baker Street; he was only grateful for it in that moment, because he honestly did not know what he might have done had Holmes reacted in some fashion, any fashion, before then.

With a hateful sense of relief, Watson shut and locked the door of their home behind them, then leaned his forehead against the cold wood for a moment. He heard Holmes remove and hang his greatcoat in the front hallway, and turned to follow him upstairs to their rooms, his own steps heavy and Holmes' somehow spaced as they normally were. Holmes moved to the sideboard and looked at the bottles of brandy and port sitting there as if he weren't seeing them at all. He was breathing far more quickly than their exertion thus far could justify. Before Watson could come up with the words to coax him into some semblance of calm, Holmes took a deep breath, held it, and then launched a half-filled bottle of port across the room and into the fireplace with a degree of violence of which Watson had not previously thought his friend capable – not even while watching him take a fireplace poker to Watson's beloved old basket chair. At first, it seemed as if that single outburst had been enough to bleed off the worst of the tension rattling Holmes' frame, but just a few breaths later, he twisted for the bottle of brandy and let out a great, furious bellow as he hurled that one straight into the wall in front of him, shattering it against the VR traced out in bullet holes in the wallpaper and sending shards ricocheting back into his own face.

"Holmes!" Fearful of the damage he that he could do to his eyes by shattering glass bottles in such close proximity to his face, Watson leapt across the room in time to stop Holmes from repeating the destruction with an empty brandy bottle. "Stop – stop!" Watson managed to get a grip on the bottle and Holmes relinquished it to him without a fuss.

Holmes wandered away, seemingly composed again, but his chemistry table suffered an almost frightfully matter-of-fact upending on his way to collapsing in their one remaining basket chair. Watson stood still against the side board, the rescued bottle in his hands, and breathed evenly without staring at where Holmes sat in a haphazard heap with his limbs spilled over the edges of the chair, save for the one hand picking at his lip as he stared at the cold fireplace.

Watson searched the air between them and wondered if the shards of broken chemistry equipment – Bunsen burner parts and the dispersed tinkles of test tubes – could be read like tea leaves by a gypsy fortune teller, or like a smattering of chicken bones tossed into the dirt. "This is not over. We will find another way to exact justice."

A weary sigh spread out in a seeming halo around Holmes where he shifted into a tighter sprawl in the basket chair. His fingers, long and agile and somehow thready after weeks of overwrought nerves, tapped a light staccato against his forehead. "Leave it, Watson. Lestrade is right; this is done with. The only thing that can come of this now is a ruin, and I'll not see you brought low on my account."

"But certainly, there are other crimes they can be charged with. They are not good men. There must be a host of other offenses that can be put to them. Perhaps they will go in for a lesser charge, but it will still be a conviction."

"No." Holmes dropped his hand and blinked into the cold hearth. He seemed so much like his old self that for a moment, Watson fought a sense of vertigo. Eventually, Holmes finished whatever thought he had paused on, and glanced back to where Watson remained standing with an empty brandy bottle clutched protectively to his chest. "Your loyalty to me has ever been a mystery, but I do not need to understand it in order to know that I wish to be worthy of it. And maybe I never can be – not truly. Because when I tell you that I would rather succumb to this than see you ruined alongside me, it is a purely selfish want. I know for a fact that I would not be able to bear the shame if I were to be the cause of suspicion falling on you."

They stared at each other for long moments, silent. "I wish I had never written those stories," Watson said. They were out in the open air before he even realized he had meant to say them aloud.

"Don't be daft," Holmes snapped, the scorn plain in his voice, as if Watson had suddenly proven himself no less banal than everyone else who had left Holmes jaded and alone. He looked back to the absent fire.

Watson shook his head and sighed. "Nevertheless – "

"You should sooner regret our entire acquaintance. I've never been good for you."

"I don't regret our acquaintance, Holmes. I should be dead now if I had never met you."

Holmes glanced toward him, tugging the chapped skin of his lower lip between two fingertips, but his gaze remained just shy of touching any part of him. "Stop saying rubbish things like that, Watson. I dislike hearing you speak so."

Watson drew in a deep breath and nodded, letting it out slowly, and then nodded again. "I feel as though I should offer to find other digs for the night, to give you privacy or…space to spend your rage, but I could not possibly conscience leaving you alone here."

For a moment, it appeared that Holmes would make no reply, not even to indicate that he found the suggestion absurd, but then he shut his eyes and seemed to be fighting weariness by the way he dragged his fingertips over his nose. "Oh, do stop being tedious, will you? Go to your club, find a room there – it makes no difference to me."

Watson blinked and then narrowed his eyes. "I am not abandoning you – "

"You clearly want to!" Holmes flung himself from his chair and rounded on Watson, his hand full of a sheaf of papers that had previously been stacked on the table beside him. It took Watson completely by surprise when Holmes threw them at him. "Why do you even stay, Watson? Is it pity? Obligation? I neither want nor require either from you! You wish we had never met, never taken up cases, never made a living here? You wish you had never found an interest in what I do? Never written about it, never made a name for yourself as well by it? Fine! Consider yourself absolved of any responsibility you feel you owe me in exchange for – for what, even?! I didn't save you Watson; you owe me nothing! Take your life and go if our acquaintance is such an imposition!"

"Holmes! Really, this is too far!"

Holmes had been leaving, taking angry strides across the room, but he stopped now and made a visible effort to unclench his fists. Without turning, he relaxed his posture and straightened with whatever dignity he clearly thought might have been wounded. "As Lestrade was kind enough to point out this morning, I have only ever had one friend. And that friend has just expressed that he regrets his regard for me."

"I regret nothing of my regard for you," Watson replied. He made to chase Holmes across the room but thought better of it, because he could feel his old familiar temper flaring somewhere inside his chest. "I only regret writing it down where others could see it."

"Oh, yes, well. That's much better, then. You only regret other people knowing that you do not find me repulsive."

"Stop misconstruing everything I say and listen to me, for heaven's sake!"

Holmes paused again in the doorway to his bedroom, still refusing to look at Watson. "Listen to what? Listen to you take back every kind thing you have ever said or written about me, in shame for having mentioned it at all? Go to hell, Watson. I would rather never have met you." He shoved himself from the jamb and then slammed the door behind himself.

Into the tension that seemed to remain behind, hovering in the sitting room, Watson stated, bald and calm, "I have been there already." Hell was a place where he resided but Holmes did not. He looked down at the pages strewn about his feet where Holmes had thrown them, covered in Watson's own cramped and untidy script. "Sometimes I believe that I may never have left."

A gentle thump sounded from the direction of the bedroom, slippered feet on well-worn wood floors. Watson expected silence and seclusion from Holmes for the foreseeable future, and so he was startled when he looked up to find Holmes standing on the other side of the room, his jacket and waistcoat discarded, and his tattered old grey dressing gown pulled on over his now wrinkled shirt. They regarded each other in silence for what felt to be a measure of time long enough to judge in pie slices on the face of a clock. They had likely never simply looked at each other like this for so long.

Holmes looked away first, but only to better navigate his mess of broken things scattered about the carpeted floor. He made his way to Watson, stopped, and with seemingly a great deal of deliberation, he looked up to meet Watson's eyes. "I am…" He shook his head, appeared to gather himself together again, stray bits tucked in against his person to be held in place by the tight wrap of his dressing gown as he closed it over his chest and tried again. "I apologize. Had I never met you, I would be the worse for it, and likely dead by now as well."

"I don't regret our association," Watson blurted. "You are my dearest friend. And that is why I wish I had never put our adventures down in writing, because it has allowed the men who harmed you to go free." His gaze dropped to the fold of Holmes' arms, his stance like a closed book, or a glass door that has been locked. "I hate to think that I am to blame for that, Holmes."

In Watson's periphery – for he could lift his eyes no higher – he watched Holmes turn his head to one side, Adam's apple bobbing with a swallow. "You should not have been made to think such a thing."

Watson nodded, though whether in agreement or in simple acknowledgement of the sentiment, he did not know. He felt numb, much in the same way that Holmes' often looked of late. It occurred to him that this conversation, or one like it, would never have taken place three months ago – could not have taken place. They were both vastly different men than they had been. That was likely the only reason why Watson was able now to confess, his voice like a brittle echo, "I don't know what to do. You must tell me what to do."

The edges of Holmes' profile wobbled a bit and creased, and his eyes cut toward one of Watson's ears – no farther. "Ever the soldier. You decry my own vices of boredom, and yet you are very much the same, mother hen. You rebel at stagnation too." The expression on his face only became clear as a sad smile when it left, much as a footprint is only a footprint after the shoe that made it has gone. "I have had clients such as myself." He did not specify, but he did not need to. "I never thought to ask them how they managed after. I never cared. It was…immaterial to me."

"You weren't to know," Watson offered. "And as you are so often wont to point out, they don't come to you for that – for sympathy. They come to you for justice."

"Perhaps." Holmes frowned a bit and lowered his head. "I am aware that I have been uncharitable to you these past weeks."

Watson shook his head. "You have experienced a trauma – "

"Allow me to finish." The words, though a rebuke, remained unnaturally soft. It reminded Watson of buttons, and Holmes standing by the mantle with a yellowback novel in his hands, his voice hoarse and his hands unsteady as he marked Watson's place in a story he never got to finish. "I should not have managed to cope without you here, Watson. But that is nothing new. I am not a kind man, and seldom a good one, but you seem not to know that about me. There were times I hated you for it – for thinking that I am a better man than I am capable of. And I have often been cruel to you for it. You…encourage me. I think, perhaps, that you do not know…" He stalled for a breath, and then rallied himself. "Watson, you are very important. The light that you conduct…" His gaze, which by then had wandered away out of discomfort at the effort to display sentiment, blinked its way back to Watson's face, to a bit of mustache, and then up as far as a cheekbone. "That light is the only light I have, you see. It is all of the light that there is."

Watson's breath turned heavy within his lungs, a contamination of air too thick now to expel. He watched Holmes blur before him, and it felt as though the room were a vacuum threatening to penetrate his chest. There must surely have been words suitable to this – something to reassure, to agree, to forgive – but Watson couldn't seem to find them within his throat. They had twisted up and died in there behind his vocal chords, and the only man clever enough to have pried them back out was even now turning away from him – from the silence that Watson gave in reply.

Before Holmes could retreat – and oh, what those words must have cost him to say aloud – Watson grabbed roughly at the billowing back of his dressing gown. It was enough to arrest him, but not enough to make him turn back around. Watson managed to find his breath somewhere swimming about the air between them, and he felt his chest spasm in an ungainly manner as he sucked a bit of it down. Eventually, still blinking at the saline-distortion of the back of Holmes' head, Watson told him, "When you died, Mary told me I had gone dark. If there is any light to conduct, it is only there when you are stood beside me."

Holmes' head tipped forward and his back juddered a bit where Watson's wrist rested against a shoulder blade. It was likely a blessing that he remained faced away, because Watson did not think that they could have said these things to the other's face, and they needed to be said. Several long breaths made their way from Holmes' lungs, as if he repeatedly meant and failed to carry words on them. The short spasms of his shoulders seemed to grow worse for a moment, and then Holmes drew himself straight with a harsh and resolute breath. "Is this what it is like to love someone?"

Even though Holmes remained facing away, Watson nodded. "I believe that it must be."

"It is absolutely wretched."

Watson offered a wet snort in response, startled out of him as it was. "Perhaps we're doing it incorrectly."

Holmes chuckled, pitched high and thick with phlegm, and then turned around. The bits of him that weren't streaked from Watson's own lacrimation appeared to be a bit red at the edges, puffy about the nose and eyes, perhaps shiny with damp. "Watson, I would like you to hear this in the spirit in which it is meant, and not through the lens of how I usually say things. Because I am bound to bollux it up, and I need you to understand what I am trying to say, in case it comes out all wrong."

The mantle clock seemed overloud as Watson let his hand slip away from Holmes' sleeve. "You're already not making much sense."

"Yes," Holmes agreed. His open mouth pinched into a curve for a moment – kindness, perhaps of a melancholy sort – and then he said, "I forgive you for not coming with me that night."

Watson could feel it when his face lost all colour and expression. He could feel his heart fall out of rhythm and attempt not to resume beating again, and he was shaking his head before he had even consciously parsed the words.

"John." Holmes' hands were an anchor on his shoulders, holding him to the floor lest he float away like helium, a new element with which he was only familiar because of Holmes and his chemistry pamphlets and mad experiments. "Whatever else I may have said, whatever blame I have assigned to you for remaining in your chair for the evening, it was not your fault. I am…no good at this." Holmes shifted on his feet, squared his stance, and resumed speaking to Watson's clavicle. "I cannot watch you continue trying to atone for this; it is grotesque. So I will attempt to do better to remember, when I am cross or unsorted, that you have done nothing to warrant assignation. And, because you have often said that the words, spoken aloud, matter: I forgive you for not doing whatever it is you still think you should have done."

The room narrowed and spun for a moment until Watson's body took over the task of breathing for him. He gasped and tried to say…nothing, there was nothing, but something crowded the back of his throat like words and surely they needed to come out lest he choke on them. Holmes turned sharp in front of him, shining like a prism, like cut crystal through water, and Watson felt his chest snap, an ugly crack of a thing breaking inside of himself before an awful flood of harsh, rent noise tore itself out and escaped into the open air.

Holmes held him still in front of him and watched, and it should have been awkward, disquieting, for them to stand like this at arm's length from each other as Watson struggled to control himself. Instead, it was…liberating in an awful sort of way. It was horrible and disarming, and being absolved had never hurt so much. Watson drew in desperate gulps of thin air through his open mouth, chest heaving, and since the dappling of his vision receded as his breaths grew more steady, the first sob took him entirely by surprise.

There was no catharsis to be found in it. Watson allowed himself only to bend and press his forehead against Holmes' shoulder, and Holmes' hands only moved so far as Watson's biceps to keep him there. It was a messy business, and it left him shaking and gutted, and he felt no better for it afterwards in spite of the lifting of the weight of months of slow suffocation. Eventually, they were only breathing quietly together in the aftermath, a bit tattered as they inhaled, but done nonetheless.

Watson lifted his head, his eyes still shut, and took the sort of breath that a man must when he finds that in spite of himself, he had let something go. When he allowed the light of the sitting room in again, Holmes sniffed and smoothed his hands down Watson's arms, only as far as the elbows before he shifted to grasp the empty brandy bottle which Watson continued to strangle by the neck with one hand. He watched Holmes pry his nerveless fingers from the glass surface and then set it on the mantle. A smear of Watson's fingerprints remained behind to mar it, evidence of his desperate hold on an empty thing.

"Tea," Holmes announced. "With honey, I think." He made a valiant attempt to grin; it would have been more effective with fewer teeth to show for it. "And then I will tell you about the jewel thieves I have been tracking, and we will discuss how best to proceed with an investigation."

Watson felt cold for a moment, but he nodded before averting his gaze and searching his pockets, and then his sleeves for a handkerchief. Holmes moved about in his periphery, setting the upended chemistry table to rights before wandering off in search of the broom, and presumably to ring for a tea service. After regaining some measure of his lost composure, Watson cleared his throat and tugged his rumpled clothes into a semblance of neatness. For all that he felt terrible and as if his sinuses were stuffed full of cotton wool, there was a kind of relief in it. For lack of anything better, he allowed himself, just for this moment, to feel it.

---

The clock in on the first floor landing chimed the witching hour while Holmes stared unblinking at the ceiling of Watson's bedroom. Other than reviewing the history of jewel heists that Holmes had compiled, they had spoken little throughout the remainder of the day. For that, Holmes was grateful; he did not know that he could have stood to discuss anything of import, not after having to give Watson his forgiveness for a thing for which he had never needed it to begin with. It had been awful, watching that, and now, his mind would not quiet. This was hardly a new occurrence in and of itself. Having no recourse, though – no remedy for it… He could not recall any point in his adult life when he did not have the option of morphine or some other chemical to muffle the unending parade of his thoughts. It was hateful.

Beside him, Watson snored in fits as he tossed about in the bedding. He had not seemed very much himself after their small drama in the sitting room, and Holmes worried, possibly more than he should. He had thought that his words would be well received, and while Watson had appeared grateful in the immediate aftermath, he had yet to return to a semblance of his usual self. Perhaps Holmes had bungled it after all; there was a reason, other than those shallow ones which Watson expounded upon in his writings, why he chose to avoid indulgence in the softer emotions. He could only ever be rubbish at them, and he knew it.

Watson grumbled for a moment and rolled away toward the edge of the bed before finally settling, his respirations subsiding into a soft slough with a whistle at one end. Holmes glanced toward him, unseeing. Somewhere outside in the darkness, Williams and Kirkpatrick likely also breathed in slumber as free men. Redding may have been convicted on the petty theft of Holmes' watch, but it was an uncertain thing, and Holmes had not yet decided if it would be better to know or not. He had half a mind to pack Watson away into a train carriage with no further fuss on the matter, and take the both of them out of the country, but it would feel too much like running away. Holmes had been running from one thing or another for most of his life, and it surprised him to realize how tired he felt at the thought of doing it again. He spared a moment's consideration for the first time he had done so, and wished that he had thought to bring his violin upstairs, if only to have something firm and familiar against which to rub his restless fingers. Being maudlin irritated him. He wanted a cigarette, but he feared to wake Watson. He wanted, in a far more obscure corner of his thoughts, to crawl away from his own skin and be someone else for a while.

The building ticked and creaked like a live thing, temperature variances and wind and the brush of leaves, steam hissing through radiator pipes, a click of twigs and bits of debris against window panes. The occasional hansom passed in the street with a clatter. Holmes closed his eyes over the dry grit of insomnia, but it made no difference; the darkness behind his eyelids looked the same.

He did not realize that he had drifted off until he woke back up with a start. Watson had migrated toward him and his breath bathed Holmes' arm in a sour-smelling warmth. The radiator pipes ticked as if to signal agitation. His heart raced in a panic for no discernable reason and he strained his ears to hear something beyond the incidental sounds of the night, knowing full well that whatever had woken him was likely nothing more than a figment, or Mrs Hudson on the stairs, checking that the lamps were all safely blown out.

Instead of footsteps on the stairs, however, Holmes' ears caught scratches coming from an entirely different quarter of the house. The sounds were too heavy for mice or other nocturnal creatures. He sat up to peer warily over the lump that Watson made in the dark. A draft reached him, emanating no doubt from beneath the crack in the door, and he smelt snow, or rather that peculiar scent of permafrost that signaled the presence of such. Holmes turned and rolled off the side of the bed, directly onto his feet. Mrs Hudson or the maid had likely opened the rear house door downstairs to refill their coal scuttle, or opened a window to allow a cool breeze to offset the heat of the oven. The hour must have been approaching dawn; they would almost certainly be about the kitchen by now.

Watson rolled into the depression left behind by Holmes' body, and thankfully remained asleep. Not even the promise of a good case could normally rouse the doctor from his slumber, insistent as he was about remaining abed until at least eight o'clock, the lazy old dog. Holmes had used to come up into this very room, back in the early days of their acquaintance, and rummage around his things just to see if he would wake. He never did. It had amused Holmes to no end.

Holmes made sure to close the door behind him as he shuffled out onto the landing and into the slippers that he had left there the night before. Watson had always possessed a peculiar aversion to sleeping with the door open, which Holmes supposed was less ridiculous than some of his own habits, especially of late. The carpet in the hallway muffled the plod of his footsteps, always overly heavy first thing in the morning. As he descended to the ground floor, he could smell the fresh smoke of a recently laid fire wafting from the kitchen. It followed him into the water closet and lingered while he completed his morning ablutions. By the time he emerged back out into the hall, the scent had transformed into that of a loaf of bread. Holmes offered the closed kitchen door a few contemplative, sleepy blinks before pronouncing it, "Sourdough, I perceive," and making his way back up to the sitting room. He nearly tripped over an umbrella fallen from the stand on the landing, and spared a moment to be thankful that he hadn't tripped on his way down instead; he hadn't even seen it there.

Returning to bed seemed a tempting thought at first, but he knew that he would only lie awake again, and possibly disturb Watson on top of it. Besides, tea would no doubt be up shortly; Mrs Hudson seemed possessed of a preternatural awareness for the exact moment of her lodgers' waking, as tea invariably arrived every morning within ten minutes of the first of them to stumble out from their rooms. It would not due to disappoint her, nor to waste a perfectly good pot of breakfast tea on a lie-in of dubious effectiveness. He hoped for Darjeeling, over which he intended to review the letter that he had received, two months ago now, about the tiara that had been sent to the jeweler for a cleaning, and returned with all of the stones replaced. He suspected a connection to the earlier jewel thefts, but his mind had yet failed to identify that link. He felt rusted and discolored, his mind a jumble of old iron and copper left too long in the damp. Watson had looked at him all of the previous afternoon as if he knew that Holmes was trying too hard to be enthusiastic about the case. His manner betrayed a nervous excitement, and Holmes did know that; he could feel it in the itch of his skin, which buzzed with a sort of fever, and in the way his voice fought to be something other than a wobbly line of notes on a sheet of music paper. He felt sick. It was cocaine, mostly – or rather, the lack of it. But it was other things too. Picture frames and buttons, and new shoes barely walked in, and five pound notes laying in puddles in the dark.

The moment that Holmes stepped into the sitting room, he knew that something was not right. The chill in the air could not be explained solely by the lack of a fire in the hearth, and the scent of permafrost, which he had earlier taken to be a draft from the door to the yard below, hung thick in the air. Without hesitating in the slightest, he clomped across the room as he normally did, and then cursed as he clipped his hip on the edge of Watson's writing desk. Surely that had not been there last evening – he thought that he recalled Watson folding up the tray and closing the roll top. No matter – it was not relevant at the moment.

Holmes kept his own revolver locked in his desk drawer along with his spyglass and pocket magnifier, Watson's checkbook, and various other implements and trinkets. His keys were on their chain, which he had left upstairs in Watson's room, coiled into a silver mound in a small bowl that Watson had set on the nightstand to ensure that his tie pin did not roll away in the night and become lost behind the bureau. Rather than attempt a hasty retrieval, Holmes simply wrenched the drawer from its track and set it on the floor. He snapped the revolver open and loaded it with fingers that really should have been trembling, and yet were not. Then he clicked the chamber back in place, cocked the hammer back, and strode quite purposefully over to his bedroom door, the weapon hanging loose at his side.

In the lingering darkness, the room appeared empty, the only movement that of fluttering papers on his nightstand and the ripple of fabric and wig hair stirred by the breeze. He nudged the door further open and poked his head around to peer behind it. Nothing. The wardrobe proved empty as well, save for his clothing and disguise paraphernalia. The wall portraits appeared undisturbed from the previous evening, and the bedclothes had neither been dented nor thrown askew. Another light gust of wind carried the scent of London into the room – industry and cold, and a hint of sulfuric ash from the underground – accompanied by a very loud, very distinct creak.

Holmes turned, the revolver raised before him. A shadow near the open window mimicked the motion, and Holmes pulled the trigger with no further thought for the face that he glimpsed there.

---

Watson jumped nearly straight onto his feet and froze, wide awake and alone in the room, ears strained for some further sound, for a clamour of footsteps or the sounds of an altercation, for…for another gunshot. If there were a second gunshot, or a third or a fourth, then it was just another instance of Holmes venting his frustration, and whatever other ill-formed emotions plagued him, on the wallpaper or the mantelpiece. A dim glow from the hall lamps on the first floor had filtered up to the landing outside his cracked-open bedroom door. It seemed as if a small eternity passed before Watson could only conclude that nothing more would be forthcoming. He stuttered into action and fairly clawed his way out of the room. He could hear Mrs Hudson moving about downstairs in small uproar; doubtless, she feared the exact same thing that Watson did, and could not bear the thought of having to see it. One gunshot implied a singular purpose, as typically, such things only needed one.

Halfway down the stairs, Watson tripped, his bad leg buckling beneath him. He gritted his teeth as he hung from the banister and forced himself to keep moving. Soldier on, it felt like – sloughing through sand dunes, weighed down by the half-dead body of another. He crested the landing and slammed his shoulder into the hallway door to Holmes' bedroom, since that was where the smell was coming from – the gun powder. Gun powder, he noted in one corner of his mind, but no pervasive, ferric odor of blood.

Holmes offered no resistance to Watson grabbing his arm, nor to his prying the revolver from his fingers and casting it aside. He blinked in Watson's direction, dazed, and allowed the intrusive patting down of his form that Watson treated him to, searching for injuries, for unnatural warmth, for wetness, for anything out of place. All seemed well, save for the fluttering of Holmes' pulse that Watson felt beneath his palms, racing in threads like a winded rabbit, when he seized Holmes beneath the ears with both hands and forced him to make eye contact. "Are you injured? Holmes! Are you hurt?"

"No," Holmes replied, his voice thick like molasses even over that single syllable.

Watson nodded, his jaw working in silence, and then he glanced over his shoulder to take in the shattered mirror at Holmes' dressing table, cracked into a spiderweb shining still in its frame with a single hole shot through the middle, the frame still rocking faintly from the kinetic impact of the bullet. The curtains fluttered in the wind blowing through the broken window beyond. Watson allowed his eyes to close briefly as he turned his back on the sight and touched his forehead to Holmes' in relief. The continued creaking of the mirror struck him as obscene, mocking them both.

"I thought I saw someone," Holmes confessed, his voice still tainted with that foreign thread of shock. "But it was only myself. In the mirror."

Watson nodded, his brow rocking against Holmes'. "Yes. I deduced that. It's alright."

Holmes twitched within Watson's grip and then lifted his hands to mirror Watson's hold on him. "I am not hurt, mother hen. I apologize for giving you such a fright."

"Yes," Watson said again. "Just…a moment, if you will."

Holmes tightened his grip and Watson leaned into it as much as he was able, considering their relative positions. "The window was open. That was why I came in. The draft."

Watson picked his head up from where it had, unbeknownst to him, dropped to rest on Holmes' shoulder. He released Holmes, but only after making a cursory examination of his skull for a hole that may have inexplicably gone unnoticed, and then moved to inspect the ruined window. "It's not open now," he pointed out. "Though I suppose the impact of the bullet could have rattled the frame enough for the sash to fall." He stepped gingerly, brushing broken glass out of the way with his bare feet, and leaned far enough forward to stick his head out the window. He could see nothing out of the ordinary, but then, it was too dark to get a clear view of the ground below. He ducked back inside and considered the remains of the window. The locked window, its latch still firmly in place. Watson considered it for perhaps too long, and then backstepped, mindful of the shards littering the rug. "This will have to be boarded up until someone can come out and replace the glass. Come. You're shivering, and I'd like to get a better look at you anyway."

Holmes gave in without comment and allowed Watson to steer him unresisting out into the hallway by his shoulders. Mrs Hudson had, by then, ventured upstairs, and at seeing Holmes emerge from his bedroom unharmed, she clasped her hands together against her breast with a deep breath before she disappeared back downstairs. Knowing her, she would reappear with the tea tray in short order, perfectly composed once again. It was only at the sound of the foyer door opening downstairs that Watson realized she had the broken window in mind first. He pushed Holmes into the sitting room amidst the sound of her summoning a few of their perpetual lurkers in to do a bit of carpentry.

"Here," Watson said, urging Holmes toward the fireplace. "Sit." He all but shoved Holmes into the chair, then went to pull the bedroom door firmly shut, thereby blocking most of the dreadful draft, before retrieving his medical kit from beneath his writing desk.

Holmes looked up as Watson made his way back, his eyes dropping to the gladstone bag. "The window was still locked, wasn't it."

Watson swallowed and blinked a few times, but in the end, he was forced to nod. "But you have been stressed lately, and I suspect that you passed a restless night. I've jumped at shadows myself, you know."

A sigh was Holmes' only answer. His thoughts seemed sluggish, and the blank expression on his face failed to completely fade as he shut his eyes and sagged back into the contours of his chair. "How much longer will you allow me to get away with this?"

Watson paused, his arm outstretched to snag a chair from their dining table. Eventually, he decided, "I am not dignifying that," and resumed his retrieval of the chair, dragging it over so that he could sit directly in front of Holmes, their knees knocking between them.

Holmes made a noncommittal noise in response and sank deeper into the chair until it seemed that he might actually find a way to make it obscure him entirely.

They both glanced up at the racket made on the stairs by whomever Mrs Hudson had conscripted to board up the window, and Watson faced forward again in time to catch Holmes cringe as the pounding of hammers commenced. "Enough," he enjoined sharply. "It is a forgivable lapse."

Holmes failed to react to that, and instead covered his eyes with the hand not in Watson's possession for pulse-taking purposes. "I know that you recall what you were like when we first took digs together, Watson, but perhaps you have forgotten what it felt like to be so very…so very tired in the wake of things." He smeared his hand over his face and then rested his cheek against it, peering up at Watson with eyes were that were less troubled than weary. It would have been an endearing pose, the aged echo of a rosy-cheeked little boy, if not for that bleak quality. "I am tired, Watson."

Watson made an impatient noise in the back of his throat and looked away. "You know how I despise melodrama." He rummaged in his gladstone bag even though he had no need of anything in there. It simply kept his hands busy.

The chair creaked as Holmes shifted in it, and then a heavy sigh made its way to Watson's ears. "Of course, my dear fellow. I will refrain."

Watson stilled his hands with an effort and then put the contents of his bag to rights before snapping it closed. When he looked up, Holmes appeared to have folded into himself, his gaze unfocused though hovering somewhere above the mantle. Watson followed his eyes to the charcoal sketch of the waterfall hanging above the fireplace. Behind him, Mrs Hudson's tread on the stairs heralded the imminent arrival of tea and bread.

Watson dropped his eyes and breathed in something like pain from a chest cold. Then he climbed to his feet and bent low to rest his forehead against Holmes' temple, cupping the other side of his jaw as if to hold Holmes to him in a gesture of intimacy that he was not quite certain he should be permitted. "I know you are tired," he whispered, aware of the languid movement of Holmes' eyelashes as he blinked. "And I do remember what that felt like." He waited a beat, hoping for an acknowledgement of some kind, and then breathed, barely audible even with his lips so near to Holmes' ear, "Please do not let it win."

Holmes tipped his head against Watson's, his nose grazing the hard line of Watson's jaw, eyes closed as if to make sure that Watson would not see the truth of the expression there. But he did not make any definite response and Watson was eventually forced to withdraw to open the door for Mrs Hudson. In the hallway behind her, one of Holmes' street urchins passed across the landing with a dust pan full of clear, non-reflective glass shards from the broken window. A second boy labored after the first, the remains of the mirror nearly beyond his strength. Watson watched his own reflection pass in broken bits over the tessellated surface of silvered glass.

It took Watson the better part of a cup of hot Darjeeling to realize what he had seen, and he froze with his lips suctioned to the rim of his teacup. If Holmes' bullet had broken the window, then at such close proximity, the bullet should have gone through the glass, shattering it into the same webbed pattern that had covered the surface of the mirror glass, marked in jagged, patterned shards that stuck in place in the frame. And the majority of the glass should have fallen outward, into the alley by the coal shed, if it had fallen from the window frame at all. The glass pieces on the floor of Holmes' bedroom had been large and geometric, and they had been scattered across the bedroom floor; Watson had tread on them as he had led Holmes from the room. And from his bedroom upstairs, he had heard only the retort of gun powder; there had been no accompanying sound of the shatter and fall of glass. He was prepared to swear to it.

Across from him, Holmes sat slumped in the corner of the settee, his empty teacup dangling from one finger in his lap. His eyes had slipped closed at some point, and Watson suspected that he had fallen asleep. The exhaustion of the past weeks appeared etched into the lines of his face, pooled in the hollows of cheeks long since gone sallow from stress and ill health. Watson blinked and finished the last of his tea before rising to rescue Holmes' teacup from a certain fall. He covered Holmes with a rug and then stood still for a strange stretch of moments, watching the even rise and fall of Holmes' chest, before he exited the room.

Outside, the sun had crested the roofs of some buildings lining the adjacent streets. He stood in the little square of mud, grass and the shriveled remains of dormant cooking herbs behind 221 Baker Street, the warmth of the hallway escaping at his back. The snow had melted back here already due to the warmth of the surrounding buildings and the repeated trips back and forth to the coal bin. Watson knew little of reading comings and goings in the tread of feet on the ground, but he did know what mud tracked up the face of the building implied, spaced as it was in parallel paths to either side of the gutter pipe that ran up to the roof. One floor above the boarded up face of Holmes' bedroom window, Watson could just make out the pattern of the curtains in his own, fluttering out through the cracked open sash. Mrs Hudson must have been up to tidy already, and opened the window to freshen the air. It was true that the plaster walls would soon permanently imbue with the scent of cigarettes and pipe smoke, if they continued to cloister themselves up there every night. But if nothing else, this proved the folly of daring to lift the sash while they slept. Holmes had always maintained that breathing was boring anyway.

Watson stepped back into the house and engaged both of the bolts on the door. Once secure, he leaned his forearms against the chilled wood, one hip cocked to relieve the weight on his bad leg, and considered contacting Lestrade. He couldn't imagine, though, what good it would do. All that he knew was that the window could not have been broken by Holmes' gunshot; it had already been broken when Holmes pulled the trigger, from the outside, while still locked, before Holmes had gone in to investigate the draft. Holmes had said that he woke to what he thought were sounds from the first floor. It must have been the breaking of the glass that originally roused Holmes from his slumber. Someone had come looking for him in his bed in the middle of the night – someone had come here, to their home, expecting to find Holmes alone in his room, asleep and unprotected. What if that person had climbed just a little higher, to Watson's window one floor above?

Behind him, Mrs Hudson called, "Doctor? Are you alright?"

"Yes, Mrs Hudson." Watson straightened and set his dressing gown back to rights before turning around. The moment he laid eyes on the woman, he could tell that she knew he was lying. It occurred to him suddenly that when Holmes descended the stairs that morning, whoever had climbed the drain pipe may have still been in the house, in the bedroom, behind the open hallway door – Holmes likely walked right past him in the dark. "No," he corrected. "No, I am... I am terrified."

Mrs Hudson glanced behind her into the kitchen, presumably to ensure that the maid was not eavesdropping, and then pulled the door shut to give them a moment's privacy. Delicate in a manner not unlike a soft-stepping bull, she said, "It was not his nerves, then. Was it."

Watson licked his lips, his mustache a rough bit of a smear across his mouth. "The glass didn't fall the right way, and there is mud tracked up the outside of the building."

"How recent?" she demanded.

And that was the crux of it, wasn't it. How close had they been. "Less than an hour old, I'd say. It is still wet, and the break of the glass is fresh – there was no moisture collected on the floor in his room, nothing scattered terribly by the wind. I believe his papers were even dry still."

Mrs Hudson simply breathed for a moment, and then she collected some part of herself that Watson had never known she held in reserve. "I will go retrieve the mirror and the pieces of glass from the bins. There would be finger prints, yes? Unless he wore gloves." She nodded to herself, and then looked at Watson. "This would be the fourth one, then – the fop that they all think he imagined."

Watson tasted little other than dust as he shook his head. "No."

"What do you mean, no?" Mrs Hudson advanced on him in such a way that Watson wondered how he had never found her menacing before. "He is not so addled – surely you don't truly believe that there were only ever three of them?"

"Of course not." Maybe. Watson worked his tongue thickly across the roof of his mouth, everything parched like dehydration and sick. "But it could have been any of the ones they released."

Mrs Hudson failed to react overmuch. "I beg your pardon."

"There was…they would have cast doubt on Holmes' account, and there would have been an inquiry – "

Very evenly, too exaggerated to indicate calm, Mrs Hudson repeated, "They were released."

"Two of them," Watson clarified. "The other went in for petty theft only."

There was outrage in the flare of Mrs Hudson's nostrils, and more yet in the pinch of her prim lips. "I see."

Not entirely sure that she did, actually, Watson attempted to elaborate. "They attempted blackmail. In their confessions – "

"No, I am quite certain that I can guess at the depravity they threatened, the bloody whore-pipes. I do not need it spelled out for me."

With a hasty nod, Watson subsided.

After a moment of shared silence, Mrs Hudson very primly cleared her throat, smoothed her apron down over her skirts, and said, "I will have breakfast ready for you shortly." She sniffed, her cheeks spotted, and then added, "I've no idea what we are to do now."

She didn't wait for an answer, though. Watson watched her turn with an excess of poise and walk away, the kitchen door swinging shut again in her wake. The hallway ticked in silence all about him like the quiet of a museum in the dark, a rush of whispers and ancient lost things with no real words to be had. Upstairs, he heard Holmes moving about, roused from his slumber in his chair, and then the tea set clanked a bit. Watson knew the sound of it all better than he knew that of his own heart. Better than he had ever known the movements of his own wife. He found himself contemplating the ceiling between them, his stomach a yawning pit beneath his ribs, because he knew this feeling. He wished fervently that he did not. They had said it just the previous day, out loud, without looking at each other, and somehow, neither one of them had even noticed. How could they not have noticed?

The chime of the hall clock startled him from his rampant thoughts, and he blinked until his composure returned. They could never speak of it. There was nothing carnal in it – of that, Watson had no doubt – and yet others would only ever see it as lewd. It had not occurred to Watson until yesterday at the courthouse that the threat of blackmail, of an accusation of indecency, was so alarmingly present, but Holmes had not appeared surprised at all – only upset by it. In fact, Holmes had been saying since the beginning that their association would be twisted like this – that it was a natural conclusion – and Watson had refused to listen. As ever, Watson had been looking at it all along, and failing to observe. Sherlock Holmes loved him. Not as a brother. Not as a friend.

Watson took a breath and let it out at a measured pace to calm his racing heart. This was not a new thing; only Watson's awareness of it had changed. He still did not harbor any physical desire for Holmes or the form of his body, and he remained certain that Holmes had no such interest in him. But that did not change the shape of the thing between them. They shared a home, a life, sometimes a plate at meals or a single cup of tea. They shared a bed.

A shadow fell down over the landing as Watson came to this final understanding, and he looked up to find Holmes frowning down over the banister. "What on earth are you doing, standing in the hallway, Watson? Come up and finish your tea. I poured you a fresh one."

This was his life. This should have been his life all along, but neither of them had been ready for that until after absences and failures at other kinds of living had pushed them both back into this house. This was the man he loved.

Watson nodded in an attempt to stall the flare of deductions that he could see threatening in the set of Holmes' features and the squinch of his eyes, like a chemical experiment bubbling over on the burner upstairs. "I was just checking the back yard."

"Whatever for?" Holmes hooked a thumb toward their sitting room. "We've plenty of coal already. Stop being a ninny and get back to the fire. Your wits are clearly addled from too much excitement before dawn. I'll add a drop of brandy to your tea, shall I?"

"That would be most welcome." Watson made his way to the stairs, favoring the throb in his bad leg, and listened to Holmes retreat to allow him the dignity of struggling up the stairs without a witness to his weakness.

Watson paused at the hall door leading into Holmes' bedroom, and then stepped inside. The fresh boards covering the broken window smelt of cedar and a hint of must. Upon the wall to Watson's right, criminals stared at him from an array of utilitarian frames. To his left, a pile of quilts lay folded over the bedstead, smudged with ash from being handled immediately after poking at the remains of coal lumps mounded beneath the grate in the now cold fireplace. Holmes had a habit of leaving just such smudgy fingerprints all over the flat. He liked to observe the spread of ash from the fire as well, between uses, and had a canary whenever someone wiped the dust from the surface of any of the furniture. Watson bore a smudge of his own, in fact – a permanent stain of pipe ash on the right cuff of his dressing gown, shaped like Holmes' thumb. It had not come out in the wash.

A cursory examination of the room turned up no dust on the dressing table, the mantelpiece, or the nightstand, and the ashes had been swept from the hearth. This alone could not be considered conclusive, however, as he had not looked for signs before the work boys had come through and tidied everything, but it still felt wrong somehow. He opened the drawers of the dressing table, trying to determine if anything had been moved. The face paints and fake noses strewn across the surface of the table had of course been disordered upon removal of the broken mirror. The wigs appeared as they normally did, but as he had never studied them in detail, he was not certain. Against the far wall, Watson examined the water pitcher and washing bowl, and after a moment, plucked a handkerchief from atop the pile of towels that he did not recognize. It bore old stains, including a blackened one that may have been blood, ingrained dirt and other, more lightly colored crusts of residue, possibly organic, possibly not. Puzzled, Watson straightened and brought the cloth nearer the oil lamp that he had lit. The fabric had once been an eggshell shade of blue, and threadbare stitching in one corner revealed the initials S.H. Just an old rag, then. Holmes likely used it to wipe the paint from his face, or to clean up after a fight. It needed a washing, though, so he dropped it into the hamper and then washed the scent of brine and filth from his hands in the basin before squaring his shoulders and pushing open the door to the sitting room.

"You were not mistaken."

Holmes looked up from his casual perusal of the morning paper and took in the outplaced determination of Watson's stance. "Of course I wasn't." His eyes flickered down Watson's frame and then back up. "About what?"

"There was someone in here this morning." Watson pointed back toward the bedroom. "Come outside and see the evidence for yourself. There is mud tracked up the outside wall of the house."

For a moment, Holmes appeared taken aback.

"I cannot tell if anything has been rifled," Watson pressed, "but it appears that your fingerprints have been cleaned away from the furniture near the window, and everything has been dusted."

Holmes recovered himself enough to stammer, "The boys likely cleaned things up a bit before they left, to make sure they got all of the glass."

"Yes, the glass," Watson agreed. "It fell to the wrong side of the window."

"It…"

"The mirror glass didn't fall from the frame. It was the window glass all over the floor."

Holmes blinked as he absorbed what Watson was telling him, and then his chest jumped with erratic respirations as he set the paper aside and stood up, his gaze traveling in an unseeing arc across the clutter of their sitting room. Then his body stuttered a bit in Watson's direction before he managed to say, "You see it too? You see – "

"I observe signs that another person has been here." Watson stepped toward him but remained nearer the fireplace.

"I walked into your desk this morning. It was open – the tray was down."

"I locked that last night," Watson reminded him, even now glancing over to see that yes, his desk had been opened and his post disordered. "You watched me do it, Holmes."

"Yes, but I thought…" His fingers played in the air, possibly meant to indicate Watson's desk, or perhaps other things in that corner of the room.

"You thought you imagined it," Watson finished for him. "You still think that you may be imagining it."

"I think that even if I am not, the rest of you will still think that I am." Holmes' eyes waxed just slightly too wide in his face. "He was here when I woke up. There was an umbrella on the floor, fallen from the rack, when I returned from the washroom. I didn't see it on my way down." His gaze landed on Watson, but only for a bare moment. "He was still here."

Watson nodded. "Holmes, we must get to the bottom of this."

To Watson's perturbance, Holmes seemed to shrink, and he drew in the hand that had been fluttering at his side to pick at his scalp – a new affectation, that. "It could have been any of them, or none – someone else. They're free – they could be anywhere." His mouth thinned into a grimace as his fingers plucked harder at the hair above his ear. "And they have been here. In here. With me." Something worse must have occurred to him then, because he went still. "I left you alone in your room, asleep. I left you alone with them."

Somehow, this had not occurred to Watson, that he could have been in danger as well. "No one came into my room; I was there the whole time."

Holmes looked at him as if he were daft. "You wouldn't know – I used to go through your things with you sleeping in the bed right there, and you never once woke up until I said your name or shook you."

This was chilling, but at the moment, irrelevant. "I am not the one they are after."

"Why not?" Holmes demanded. "Anyone who reads your stories would know that the surest way to me is through you."

There were many reasons why such a statement might be true, many interpretations of it, but Watson chose to entertain none of them. "Surely there was not enough time for someone to come up to my room and then go back out through your window. Were you downstairs that long?"

"No," Holmes replied. "I was not. But there was no one in my room still when I walked in with my revolver – I shot at my own reflection. That much was true." He paused. "What if he had not yet left?"

An image came to Watson's mind, of standing out in the small square of yard, gazing up at his own open bedroom window. His blood felt cold in his veins. "The upstairs window is open. I saw it when I was outside, but I did not open it."

"Neither did I, and Mrs Hudson has not been up to tidy yet."

"But we would have heard – " Watson cut himself off before he finished that thought because over the sound of the tramping of shoes in the hallway as the street boys cleaned up and hammered boards over the broken window, no. They would not have heard someone moving about the second floor. "He was in my room the whole time – with me."

Before Watson could curse his own unobservant stupidity for missing the presence of some vagabond watching him sleep, Holmes told him, "Count yourself lucky that in your haste to come to my aid, you did not look around your own room. Unarmed and fresh from sleep, Watson, I imagine that you would not have fared well."

No. He likely would not have. But the feeling that it left him with, to know that behind him, in the same room with him, had likely stood the man, or one of the men, who had been tormenting Holmes… His expression soured on his face, shriveling into a curl of utter disgust gnarled up with his mustache, and he seized the fireplace poker before storming the stairs in a temper. If he were lucky, the bounder would still be up there, and Watson could enjoy a bit of sport before the coffee arrived, unlikely as he knew the possibility to be.

As expected, his room proved empty. He and Holmes prowled about it for several minutes, attempting to find anything out of place, any evidence of an intruder, any clue to his identity. Eventually, Holmes paused and lifted his chin at the table on his side of the bed. "That is the same tie pin that you put there last night?"

Odd as such a question should have been, Watson merely stalked to the tray and confirmed, "Yes, the same one."

"My keychain – you set it there with your tie pin for me last night. Did you move it?"

Watson blinked. "No. You don't have it?"

"I did not bring it with me when I left the room." Holmes moved more cautiously about the room now, checking again for anything out of place. His circuit brought him again to the window, and then he turned to glare at the bedding, still disturbed from Watson's precipitous flight barely more than an hour ago.

Watson studied the tangle of sheet and blankets as well, attempting to determine what had so arrested Holmes' attention, but when he glanced up to question Holmes, he found himself the object of yet more fervent scrutiny. "Holmes?"

"Pray, be still for a moment." Holmes came round to Watson's side of the bed and stood before him for nearly a minute like a great ostrich weaving its beak about Watson's head and face. He then shifted his examination to Watson's torso, and finally further down until he had reached Watson's slippered feet.

His skin crawling at the scrutiny, Watson finally said, "Holmes, I demand to know what you are on about."

Holmes looked up at him from his seat on the floor as if he had forgotten entirely that the feet he was so intent upon were attached to his friend. "Apologies, dear boy. It's nothing. I thought only that he may have marked you, but I see nothing amiss." He grasped the bed post and hauled himself upright once more. "I wish to examine the attic door for signs of entry, though I suspect that there is nothing to find. It would not do to be too overt when attempting to drive someone's wits from them, after all. The key to true madness is, at its essence, a cunning kind of subtlety."

Watson threw a sharp look at Holmes' back but said nothing as they crossed the hall to the attic door. They had to pick the lock as the only keys to the old door were the one that Mrs Hudson kept in the drawer of her own nightstand, and the one on Holmes' own keychain. It would be prudent to call a locksmith and have all of the locks replaced on all of the doors, now that someone had taken Holmes' keys. Watson started to say something to that effect as they entered the storage area, but as soon as Holmes struck a match to light the candle in the wall sconce, Watson stepped on a collection of sharp objects. With a muttered curse, he lifted his foot and looked down to find Holmes' chain looped in loose coils across a bare floor board, keys arrayed about the ring like a fan of peacock feathers on a bright spring day.

~TBC~