fic for rabidsamfan: Good for the soul

[holmesticemods]

Title: Good for the soul
Recipient: rabidsamfan
Author: hiddenlacuna
Verse: ACD Holmes AU
Characters/Pairings: Holmes/Watson; Holmes/Moriarty; Watson/Morstan
Rating: Mature
Betas: vulgarweed, drbeardface
Warnings: Major character death; ACD AU; magical realism; soulmate AU; death; minor character death; nasty things happening to innocent people in passing; angst; ambiguous ending; canon-typical drug use
Summary: Post-Reichenbach epistolary confession from Holmes to Watson

March 15, 1894

Doctor Watson,

I have resolved to be open and honest in this, my confession, and so I shall be. If you will read to the end of this letter, despite all I have done, I would be most grateful to you.

It is an excessively queer feeling to be certain that one has at last met one's counter, but upon shaking hands to have one's wrist remain stubbornly blank.

I had never been much interested in domestic bliss or partnership, and I had seen more than enough of the desperation which compels men and women to spend their time seeking their counters instead of actually living their lives, or else withering despondent over surviving an expired term. Having considered the question in my youth, I had resolved to live my life uncountered, unbanded, and ringless.

Every schoolboy knew that our Queen had been fortunate enough to have found her counter in Albert in 1839. For 32 years they lived and were happy, and they approached December 14, 1861 with appropriate English stoicism. And yet, she mourned his passing with a bitter grief, and she shows no sign of acceptance even now. Our Queen dressed in black to match the band around her wrist, indulging in an obscenity of grief as she raged against her loss more than she had celebrated the time with her counter. Perhaps it was remorse that it had been he instead of she who ended their term. I have never been much educated in the Viennese studies. I suppose I do not need to understand it to understand her, however.

But I digress before I have even begun. Forgive me.

On an otherwise unremarkable day in midwinter of '87, when a gaunt, tanned doctor and soldier, recently invalided home from service, shambled stiffly into the Barts upper chemistry laboratory, I felt certain, with the arrogant naïveté of youth, that my life’s term was about to be revealed.

A surreptitious glance at your tanned but unblemished hands revealed that you had no counter, and your left hand bore no ring – you, like me, were unattached as well as living on free time. I recall that I grinned. I extended my hand, and boasted "you have been in Afghanistan, I perceive" to delight in your bewilderment. I felt a thrill of excitement and electricity as our palms met, and I observed that you were as eager as I to discreetly flick your wrist to read the duration of our time together on this earth. I hoped it would be a lengthy one.

Nothing appeared.

You seemed as perplexed as I, and you continued throughout the rest of our conversation to gently rub at the thin skin below your lifeline, to see if a term would appear. It seemed that Stamford had brought you to me not as a matchmaker but merely as a facilitator, having heard that Dr Watson was in need of lodgings and knowing that I had located rooms I was not able to afford on my own income.

I am certain that this bafflement was where our affair began. Almost as though we assumed our initial handshake to have been improperly performed, we continued to find excuses to touch each other. In any case, surely if the second handshake or fifth anointment of a wound or hundredth kiss had not revealed our connection, being roughly ravished on the seventeenth step after solving a particularly invigorating case or the long, slow swallowing of your prick on the settee on a summer's afternoon wouldn't do so, either. But that did not deter us.

For nearly seven months, we were partners in every sense, I having enticed you into sharing my work and my bed as soon as you would join me in either. We were compatible without being counters, and with no term to confine us and guide our planning, we were as carefree and happy as any two uncountered people could be.

Only a fool or a romantic ignores the inevitability that nothing will change when life is as you like it, and I was neither. I tallied the days the way a miser counts his pennies, hoarding the details of each one in the previously precious space of my memory.

When Miss Morstan brightened our doorway that July and I saw the same expression of hopeful recognition and longing that I had seen in January, I knew that it was simply a matter of time until you realized I had lost you. I can never begrudge her for finding you, nor you for loving her. She was ideal for you, and you for her. She was clever, brave, kind, intelligent, and headstrong. I admired her immediately, as one would a stained glass window lit by the afternoon sun. The fairer sex has had no appeal to me beyond the academic, but she was glorious.

I have often dwelt on the moment you took Miss Morstan's hand in the gardens at Pondicherry Lodge. I have wondered whether you had been eager to find a moment to test your skin against hers, or whether you thought that you were somehow immune or incapable, since we had not found ourselves to be counters. Did you, like me, believe your counter to be inescapably male, or were you always equally curious about whether the touch of either sex's hand had the potential of revelation?

I recall well that as soon as you touched her, the connection that immediately blossomed between you was more obvious to me than a muddy footprint on a marble floor. You could not have noticed, but I strode immediately away, into the gardens, to give you the privacy of your discovery, and to give me enough time to compose myself. I would rather have walked naked through Piccadilly Circus than let you see my streaming eyes. But of course, you only saw each other.

It was unseemly for me to do so, but I made a point of observing your term at first opportunity. Just over four years. I mourned even as I rejoiced for you. I did not wish to lose you, beyond as much as I already knew I had.

For those years, I wrapped myself in casework, cocaine, and morphine. Occasionally you would join me on a particularly interesting intrigues, but for the most part you were at home, making the most of your time with Mary, and she of her time with you. I had expected you to visit me at some point to tell me that you were expecting joy, but that never occurred.

You chose to accompany me on my more dangerous and interesting adventures, confident in your term. You were dangling your life in front of fate like a morsel of meat in front of a caged cat.

I must admit that I was doing much the same, albeit not for the same reasons. I had, over time, discovered a vast criminal web operating in London with a spider at its centre, and I had been doing my best to snap as many threads of silk as possible. It kept me occupied.

It was only a matter of time before the spider crept into my parlour. I swear to you that I did not seek him out from suspicion or hope or jealous revenge. I considered him a worthy enemy, and the man likely to be the death of me, nothing more.

Moriarty offered me the chance to join him in his life and criminal endeavours; I naturally refused. Our entire conversation was agreed to be a foregone conclusion. We traded barbs and threats, and it seemed as though he would leave as suddenly as he had come, and our deadly adversarial dance would continue. He was the cobra, I the mongoose; natural enemies in unnatural clothing.

I did not tell you this when I recounted our meeting, but before he left, Moriarty offered his hand to me, asking that we greet each other properly, for our duel was about to begin. And as I am an arrogant and vainglorious man, I took it.

I immediately felt the term rise like a bruise upon my skin. I was not prepared by any medical or anecdotal description for the swirling tempest of pleasure and attraction which coursed through me, from the bottoms of my feet to the top of my head, and which flowed down my arm to the point of our contact. Throughout, Moriarty never took his eyes from my face, though he must have been feeling the same things I was.

I stared at my newly revealed term in utter disbelief. That all I had of myself, and all I had with you, should have come to this, inextricably linked to this monster of a man, was unconscionably appalling. I wrenched my hand from his in horror and immediately locked myself in my bedroom, like a child afraid of a thunderstorm.

I would not have been surprised if he had remained, waiting for me, when I emerged some hours later, but he had gone. I did not know whether I was thankful or hurt to find myself alone with my newly branded wrist, and my realization that the cruelest term is not always one’s own.

I cannot deny that there was a strong temptation to cast aside all I had done, all I had built in my work and my life, to join him. He was fascinating and dangerous, like a beautiful but poisonous mushroom in a child's vegetable garden, or a dusty jewelled serpent asleep under an embroidered pillow. That night, when I took myself in hand, the name on my lips as I spilled was, for the first time in many years, not John but James.

I affected long shirtcuffs to hide my wrists as a precaution – not from the world, but from you. I wanted to spare you the knowledge that our strange affair would end in a coincidence of bitter cosmic humour. The two of us, ignoring the rest of the world, I had once thought. Yet the world had taken notice of us, and intended to come crashing down around us.

Moriarty began his campaign to dismantle my life. I believe he was pleased rather than dismayed that our term was so short; he would have me and kill me, or we would head together to the Beyond. An eternal extension of term, perhaps.

At times our physical paths would cross, and we would rut together even as we vowed between gasps to strangle the life out of one another at the first opportunity. I took to carrying an extra set of drawers in my coat pocket, so that I could dispose of the remnants of our disgusting trysts and proceed with my daily mission of causing him as much inconvenience as possible. We were attracted to each other even as we repelled each other, like a pair of magnets spinning between north and south at random.

I continued to refuse to join him, though he continued to cajole me with a gleeful hopelessness at each encounter. I had had years to practice the mastery and suppression of my emotions; why now should I allow myself the indulgence, when even the powerful and seductive pull of spending my term with my counter did not outweigh my disgust at the life he had chosen to lead? I came to realize that it was my struggle and self-disgust that sustained him far more than my agreement to rule at his side would ever please him.

Piece by piece, we destroyed each other. I flooded a warehouse where he had been importing smuggled silks and linens. One by one, my little street Arabs began to disappear. I allowed Mycroft to pull the strings which led to his termination from his post at the University. A runaway hansom sent Wiggins to the infirmary with shattered legs. I orchestrated a raid that sent fifty of his men to the gallows. Bodies that were far, far too small surfaced occasionally in the Thames.

We had a little less than two weeks remaining in our term when he burned me out of Baker Street. Mrs Hudson survived, though the skin on her hands and arms would forever be twisted and scarred. I ensured that she would have the means to escape London as soon as she was well enough to travel.

I visited your consulting room on that damned late April day, and persuaded you to join me in an immediate flight out of England and to the Continent.

For nine days, we fled with purpose and Moriarty followed. I had drawn him from London like poison from a wound. I knew that you were grimly waiting for the final confrontation, but that you were determined to face it with courage.

Selfishly, I was glad you were with me. I did not know whose last days I was savouring more. I would not have spent them more gladly with anyone else.

On the fourth of May, 1891, the date you bore proudly and I still concealed, we set off towards the abyss of the Reichenbach together. The day had dawned clear and cold, and neither of us had slept well. We walked in silence, each of us preparing ourselves privately for whatever the day might hold.

As we neared the chaos of the waterfall, you were persuaded into returning to the Englisher Hof in hopes of saving a dying Englishwoman. I let you go. That deception - sending you on a fool’s errand, on that day, to try to save a phantom Englishwoman - was Moriarty's cruelest act, and I would have killed him for that alone.

We faced each other at the roaring waterfall, where we struggled against each other’s will for the last time. Though I did not expect to prevail, I obliged him to precede me into the next world, then watched with something that was not quite satisfaction as my term day turned to solid blackness, circling my wrist. A mourning band of triumph.

I had just finished climbing the treacherous cliffs beside the falls when I saw you. I was hunting Moriarty's favourite colonel, a sniper who I was sure had taken your life from a safe and cowardly distance as you returned to the hotel to assist your nonexistent patient. I was certain that he was lying in wait for me to return down the mountain path, should Moriarty's plans for us to finish together have failed, as indeed they had. I was so convinced of my own cleverness in sussing out Moriarty’s contingency plan, that my bowels turned to water and my mouth to ash as you strode furiously into view and up the path.

Seeing you there, with your as-yet-unnoticed wrist ringed in a black band, I realized what I had done and I was struck dumb with horror. Dimly, I watched you as you stood above the cauldron of the Reichenbach, calling my name. I could not reply. I did not wish to comprehend that you were standing before me. I could not help but wait for you to turn your attention to your wrist, and for understanding to descend upon you, as it had upon me.

You were not the only Watson I visited on the 24th of April.

The first place I had gone on that day was to your house, to reassure myself that you and Mary were both still well, and to bid you goodbye. Your Mary was a formidable woman. She saw that what I really required was permission to take you, for those last days. She knew that you would never hesitate. She gave me her blessing, and kissed me on the cheek at the door. She loved you well enough to let you go on your own, and to endure what came after bravely.

She must have known that I was leading you to your most certain death. She knew that you expected that she would be the one to be decorated with the mourning counter band. She knew that she would need to carry the burden of facing the rest of her life in a world where she had known and lost you. She would have honoured your memory, and kept your name alive on her lips for the rest of her days. But I had been stupid enough to visit her in her house, and to allow her to kiss me on the cheek as I left. I can still feel it, though it has been nearly two years. I think I shall always feel it, burning like a caress.

There must have been an unfriendly pair of eyes on us as we stood in your doorway, bidding our final goodbyes. She could not have known that she had become a piece in Moriarty’s great game of chess. With her innocent kiss, she had been revealed to be my secret queen; a loss that would devastate every facet of my life and legacy, whether I survived him or not. No matter what the outcome of the fourth of May, Moriarty putting Mary between the crosshairs of his sniper’s rifle ensured that any of us who saw the dawn of the fifth would wake to a bleak and empty world.

If there is any justice in the world, I hope with every fiber of my being that it was quick and that she did not suffer. I have it on good authority that modern air rifles are powerful indeed, and that Colonel Moran is very skilled in his despicable pursuits. Certainly, I did not read any sensationalist nonsense in the newssheets. Merely that a woman was shot dead as she dozed before her own fireplace, and that the police had no suspects.

I do not know if you can forgive me. I survived my counter and I feel nothing but relief. I cannot imagine what it is to pass the termination date of someone whose company you enjoyed. Whose life you shared. Someone you loved. Someone who loved you.

I have written you my confession, my dearest Watson, to tell you that I am the cause, even though I was not the author, of your wife's death. If there is any god to hear it, I pray for Mrs Watson, and I thank her daily for her sacrifice. I have spent these last two years wiping every trace of Moriarty's network from the earth, in her memory and for the preservation of whatever happiness can be salvaged from your future.

There is one final piece of the network remaining, and if you have read this far, you will understand why I have saved this final piece for you. I give this man to you, if you choose, so that you may take your vengeance and assist me once final time in my work. After you have achieved whatever peace you may find, through lawful means or no, I will never contact you again if you ask me to. The choice is yours.

I do not believe in fate. I reject the machinations of an unfair universe which brought you to me and did not permit me to have the last day of our earthly acquaintance emblazoned on my wrist. I would have cherished every day spent with you, knowing that you were mine. I cherish each of them nonetheless.

My dearest, dearest fellow, if nothing else I only ask that you believe me: I have always been, and will always remain until whensoever my truly final day shall be,

very sincerely,

Yours.

Sherlock Holmes

Comments

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

I can't say that the tags "Holmes/Moriarty", "major character death", "minor character death" and "nasty things happening to innocent people in passing" filled me with enthusiasm to read the fic, and I can't truly say that I'm glad I read it.

But I am full of admiration for this strange world you've created, for the quality of your writing, and for all the original ideas the story contains. Poor Mary's fate in particular stood out for me. Paradoxically, your decision that she should be a victim of Moriarty and Moran shows such respect for the character - shows her importance to Watson and to Holmes.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Wow, this was so powerfully written. You did an amazing job creating a voice for Holmes that was horrified and repentant and, through it all, still desperately loving toward Watson. Also, what a neat imagining of the way soulmate magic works in this 'verse, with the band and the time shared decided, but with neither party knowing which one of them will die on the appointed day. Fascinating! And so full of potential for drama, as you very deftly showed. This was really beautiful writing.

[sanguinity]

I myself have never had much patience for the idea that Holmes and Moriarty are flip sides of the same coin, and I like your treatment of it here, wherein Holmes has no patience for the idea, either. The chemistry may exist, but one still makes one's own choices.

...and yet, despite his assertion that he gets to make choices about how he'll deal with his counter/ring, he still gets sucked into that whole disaster, still allows himself to become an accelerant to the carnage. Perhaps most damning of his actions is that it required Mary's death before he could own his part in it: when it was 'only' Irregulars dying, when he thought that it would 'simply' be he and Watson marching to their deaths together...

(And how much did he enjoy the fact that their counters bore the same date? One could almost pretend -- almost -- that each ring referred to the other.)

The question for me, always, is what motivates Holmes to fake his death and disappear for three years, without a word to Watson as he goes. This here? This is a compelling reason.

[venusinthenight]

OMG, so good and heartbreaking and and and...

Yes.

[tiltedsyllogism.livejournal.com]

oh my god, I ADORE this. My favorites, by far, among this sort of soulbond AUs are the ones that subvert the trope and show its limitations as it bumps up against human experience, and you have done that here, in the most gorgeous and heartrending ways: not only by making Holmes and Watson lovers without being Counters, not only with the Holmes/Moriarty twist (and I'm with sanguinity - it's really nicely done to have Holmes feel the pull to Moriarty while also despising those same feelings) but with Mary's death. They're all caught in this weird bio-magically determined net, but in the end, Mary gets killed because of a relationship that has nothing to do with that sort of programming: she and Holmes care about ans respect each other, as an outgrowth of Holmes' own chosen relationship with Watson, and that is the net that tightens around her neck, in the end. It's a lovely piece of narrative architecture, but also a really gorgeous counterbalance to the determinism of the soul bonds.

And I love, too, the offhand suggestions of a fully-fleshed-out Victorian world that takes the same sort of energetic scientific interest in Counters as in anything else (the Viennese school! ha!)

really stunning work.

[swissmarg]

Well this is really rather excellent. I set this aside to read later because of the MCD and Holmes/Moriarty, but wow, this is not at all what I was expecting, and I mean that in the best possible way. I love how you've subverted the soulmates trope... and I wonder if it isn't perhaps possible to have 2 soulmates in a lifetime? What will happen the next time Holmes and Watson shake hands?
I thought this line was particularly beautiful and evocative: He was fascinating and dangerous, like a beautiful but poisonous mushroom in a child's vegetable garden, or a dusty jewelled serpent asleep under an embroidered pillow. That so perfectly sums up the fascination and disgust Moriarty engenders.
I also really like how you introduced the soulmate signs and were able to inform us of the way the world works without any lengthy infodumps. It was all so smoothly integrated into the narrative.
And the twist with Mary's death was simply brilliant.
A really very well crafted piece.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

First, an apology for how long it took me to respond. I wanted a keyboard, and my tablet just isn't adequate.

I too took a deep breath at the tags, but I'm so glad I dived in. This is wonderful in the most heartbreaking of ways. Ever since I read it the first time I keep coming back to it in my head, wondering what the ramifications of your worldbuilding might be on society, and of course, what the ramifications of your story might be for Watson and Holmes. (I want to wrap them both up in fuzzy blankets and comfort, even if I know they'd only be confused.)

I love the canonical touches you got in there -- Watson and Mary holding hands for the first time, Holmes being so elated at the first meeting, Moriarty being compelling and repugnant at the same time. And of course, Reichenbach. This one goes in the best of the Reichenangst files, and deserves to be there for so many reasons.

Thank you so much! I loved it!

[methylviolet10b]

Oh, ouch - in the very best of ways. Like many others, I deferred reading this for a number of reasons - time, but also the MCD and Holmes/Moriarty tags. But I am genuinely impressed with what you've done here. Your world-building is exceptional, and your Holmes voice throughout it all - wow, just wow.

[mistyzeo.livejournal.com]

This is excellent. What a fascinating take on the soul bond! I love. Well done.

[hagstrom]

This was fantastic! Truly, when you read a fic when you recognize the characters to be so adjusted to the books, when the worldbuilding is so natural that is a beatiful setting and not a detractor of your attention, is just magnificent.
Now all I want to do is get something to eat and sit down in silence to read this again.