Prompt: Watson's coffee, from Stutley Constable
It was just a cup of coffee.
Watson had first developed the taste for it in medical school, when he needed to stay awake for long hours studying and found tea wasn't doing the job. The habit followed him into the army, where early hours combined with a naturally lazy disposition made him a coffee drinker for life.
Upon arrival at 221b Baker Street, Watson had been pleased to find another coffee drinker in a nation so fond of tea it bordered on the obsessive. Late night stakeouts, as Sherlock Holmes said, required stimulation. Late night medical calls required the same, Watson would counter. 221b thus became the only flat in all England, and Mrs. Hudson the only landlady, who never served a pot of tea.
Later, the coffee habit would prove detrimental, keeping Watson awake when he needed to sleep, but it always proved helpful again in the end, keeping him from nightmares of crashing waterfalls and a rocky demise at the bottom.
In the army again, coffee proved a friend to a veteran doctor, who needed to stay awake to save as many as he could from the trenches, or else to keep himself from hearing the screams of those he could not save in his dreams.
After his return from the army, into retirement at last, a cup of coffee became again simply something to enjoy at the breakfast table with a friend, a daily routine at the cottage in Sussex Downs, again the only home in England where tea was never served.
Holmes would laugh about it, and Watson would smile, in the comfortable way old friends are with each other.
The end, when it came, came softly. A second war proved too much for the gentle, aging Dr. Watson, who went at last to the only mystery Sherlock Holmes could not solve.
After, when all was finished, Sherlock Holmes, the perfect reasoning machine, shut up Watson's bedroom and removed his novels and his clothes, so that reminders were not all around him. Rational he might be, rational enough to know how difficult it would be to be constantly surrounded by reminders of a companion never to return. Though he knew, of course, there were things he could not anticipate, having at last accepted that reasoning only went so far and even he could not predict everything.
It was the sight of Watson's last cup of coffee, now cold on the table where he had left it that last, horrible morning, that caused the great detective to stop, take a breath, and grip the chair in sudden realization that Watson would not be back to finish it. That it was his last cup of coffee, and Holmes's last cup of coffee with him.
He had always believed in the importance of small things. Small details which might lead to the denouement of a case. But it really was the small things which showed the full measure of a loss.
It really wasn't just a cup of coffee.
A/N: Sorry for the angst!