Dec. 1st: From Book Girl Fan: Baubles

AN: Hey everybody! It's great to be back. Thank you Hades Lord of the Dead for setting all this up! Can't wait to see what everybody writes this year.

I was midway through performing the autopsy when I was brusquely interrupted.

"Watson, my dear man, have you got any leeches about?" Sherlock said as he came rushing into my surgery.

"Dammit man!" I exclaimed, hands tangled up in intestines. "This is not a good time Holmes. I'm working on a case."

Sherlock himself had been "dead" himself for three years, and had only resurrected himself but six months earlier. In his absence, I'd tried my best at making myself useful to Scotland Yard and would occasionally consult on a case, typically in the form of a medical professional. It was possible there were plenty of other professionals of the Harley Street variety who were more knowledgeable than me, but none more trusted, and none other than me with years experience working alongside the world's greatest detective.

From time to time Lestrade would recommend me for cases he knew would fail to entice Sherlock. It was one such commonplace suspected-murder case I had my hands full with when Sherlock had blustered in like a whirlwind and began rummaging through every cabinet in sight.

"The garden variety will work fine, if you haven't anything more exotic," he said, still raiding my surgery as if I hadn't said a thing. "I've already solved my case, I just need the proper flourish to make my point."

"Get out of-" I began, before catching up with what he was saying. "Are you looking for leeches? Here? What year do you think it is?"

He continue his assault on my business, opening everything, closing nothing. "If you haven't any here, what about that mentor of yours? Winters, was it? You said he always kept some of the beasts about."

I paused at my work. "Dr. Winters? Sherlock, the man's been dead for over two decades now. If you want leeches, put on a pair of boots you don't want anymore and moonlight as a tosher. Don't come here, to a modern house of medicine, and bother me while I'm literally up to my elbows in work."

Sherlock finally halted, staring into my latest cabinet he'd laid siege upon. "He's been murdered." He spoke dryly. "Your man there on the table."

I sighed in exasperation. "You haven't even been looking at him. You don't even know the rudimentary details of this case."

Without turning around, Sherlock gave his closing statements, as it were. "The torso has the unmistakeable build of a laborer. His lack of cuts of scrapes rule out gardener or bricklayer, and his the myriad of age old burn marks littering his skin place him would place him as a metal worker to even the dimmest of minds. His lack of a complete head point to a death through violent means of great strength or brutality; the lack of lacerations in lieu of pulverized flesh mean a mashing of the head was the cause of removal rather than a chopping. Industrial machinery is clearly the tool of his demise. But, I daresay, no lifeless machine is alone responsible for chewing up this man's skull in its teeth."

All things I already knew, either through reports of investigators on the case, or by means of my ongoing autopsy. "And I suppose you also know the identity of the culprit?" I asked, unamused.

"In fact, I do."

Despite knowing the detective as long as I had, the confidence of his response for a case in which he'd merely peeked at the victim in his peripherals gave me a start. "What?"

"I can't give you a name or anything," Sherlock admitted, causing me to relax. He could return from the dead, but he couldn't divine solutions out of air. "In fact, I can't give you anyone to arrest. Your culprits lungs, they're obliterated by poisonous fumes. He slipped in a coughing fit which caused his head to land between two behemoth limbs of steel. It's rather too boring to explain how I know this when you'll discover the clues on your own."

I pulled my hands out of the cadaver and wrung them out in frustration. "I thought you said he was murdered."

"In all but the legal sense." I could hear Sherlock's grimace without needing to see it. "That man's employer's know full well the poison they pump into their worker's." He turned around holding some small object in his hands, finally revealing what he'd been staring at while he'd been thoughtlessly babbling out the solutions to my mystery. "What are these doing here?"

Sherlock had untied the small satchel that contained five desiccated orange pips. In the cupboard he'd retrieved them from were a plethora of other baubles and trinkets; a butterfly net, a taxidermy snake, a handkerchief with the initials "CAH", and such things.

"Mementos," I replied, taken aback by the sepulchral look on my friend's face.

"Mementos of the worst atrocities we've encountered?" He was nearly scowling. "Your artistic liberties in those retellings of our cases are one thing, but fetishizing these acts of abject barbarity we encountered is wholly unbecoming."

"I- I," my annoyance at Sherlock's invasion of my business metamorphosing into his castigation of me was making it difficult to construct my thoughts in the proper order. "Those might be trifles plucked from the depths of our most despairing experiences, but they also remind me of my fondest most dear, most exciting memories."

Sherlock stared at the seeds in his hand. "In all the time I've worked as a consulting detective, I don't know that I have achieved much more than to pay my own rent. To keep such things enshrined such reminders of the impotency of our profession to strike evil at the heart…"

Sherlock dashed the small cloth to the floor, scattering orange pips in five directions. He bustled out of my surgery before I could complete more than a single exclamation in surprise.

I bent down and collected the seeds, smearing them with blood. That too, would dry in time.

::::::::::

Long into the night I sat in my armchair with a cigar smoked slow enough I burned through an entire box of lucifers to relight, and a glass of whiskey I emptied and refilled so often I made no less than seven trips to relieve my self.

Sherlock and I likely bickered more than we exchanged polite conversation these days, but I couldn't recall a time, pre-postmortem or post-postmortem we had ever fought.

I wondered and pontificated and imagined my brain in circles as to whether Sherlock had fallen asleep the moment his head hit the pillow that night, or if he'd have even a second thought about his outburst.

I was woken up early to a splitting headache and an incessant knock at my door.

"Wiggins?" I was shocked to see the street arab at my door, carrying a large crate. "What in bleeding hell do you need at this hour?"

"Er," Wiggin's face contorted in either hurt at my words, or in exhaustion of wielding such a cumbersome parcel. "Mind if I come in an' set this bastard down?"

"Oh bloody- give me that," I tore the crate from Wiggin's hands, nearly throwing out my back in the process. "And close the door behind you, you're letting in a draft."

I waddled into my kitchen and offered Wiggin's some coffee, of which he turned down for a glass of water.

"What is this all about, old boy?" I asked, warming my hands at my stove as it heated the water.

"You're asking me?" Wiggin's handed me an envelope. "I've been lugging that jolly thing for wha' feels like ages."

I tore into the envelope with a butter knife. "Well, open the damn thing," I said as I read over the contents of the letter.

My dear Watson,

If you insist on keeping trophies like an ill-refined big game hunter,

you may as well take this most lurid of displays off my hands,

-Regards, Holmes

"'Oly 'ell," Wiggins said, peering into the crate. "What did that letter say?"

I smirked, seeing what I had been gifted. The giant head of the biggest black hound I'd ever seen. "It was an apology, but not in so many words."