Fic for elareine:The Five Doctors
Dec. 1st, 2017 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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holmesticeTitle: The Five Doctors
Recipient:elareine
Author:gardnerhill
Verse: Elementary; ACD Canon; Granada; Ritchie Films; BBC Sherlock; My Dearly Beloved Detective; Fox & Universal Films.
Characters/Pairings: Holmes & Watson.
Rating:PG-13 (one passage of disturbing medical details)
Warnings: Some particularly graphic medical passages.
Summary: Great minds think alike.
Word Count: 10,090
***
Joan Watson spoke directly to her laptop. “I’m not in the mood for any games tonight. I need direct answers and help.” She used a stern tone and expression to hide her fear. “I know a lot of you are on the cutting edge of technology and science. I’m aware of the theories going around about parallel universes and the like. Maybe some of you even have access to a device or two in that discipline.”
Her email beeped. No sender listed in the pop-up message. AND YOU NEED US TO HELP YOU PULL PEOPLE FROM OTHER WORLDS RATHER THAN GO TO EXPERTS HERE IN THEIR FIELDS, BECAUSE…?
As if they needed to ask. Deductive reasoning was not solely the province of her detective partner. “Everyone” were amoral but not stupid. They didn’t ask why Sherlock hadn’t contacted them first, the usual course of things involving the hacker collective. They’d know it would have something to do with Sherlock’s non-appearance. They just wanted her answer; “Everyone” trafficked in information.
Joan Watson kept her face neutral. Don’t show fear, don’t give away your hand. If you want a favor of a dragon, there is a way to do it. The best way is to play to the dragon’s personality. Think like them. React like them.
She made herself shrug. “I’m testing a theory. Thought it would be fun to do.”
A long pause. Then another incoming email. PONY PRINCESS FANFIC, 1000W. YOUR ACTUAL NAME AS BYLINE.
If only these antisocial creepoids would accept cash payments… “When do you want me to post?” Watson asked.
Beep. PAYMENT BY MIDNIGHT TONITE.
Fortunately this wasn’t the first time “Everyone” had wanted payment involving the inexplicably popular animated series; they kept the entire run of the cartoon available for research at the brownstone. Sherlock had looked rather fetching in a rainbow-coloured mane performing something called the “Muffin Dance” – and since that act had netted them some CCTV footage that helped to halt a squad of human traffickers he considered the loss of dignity a fair trade.
Sherlock. Remember why she was doing this.
“Agreed.”
Joan called up a blank page and began writing.
Beep. NOT TOO MANY ADVERBS. Great, they were reading over her shoulder.
She stopped her mouth from turning up in a grin as she recalled a fond memory of watching a ghastly film with Oren. “Crossovers okay?”
Beep. YES.
She posted “Saddle-Starshine’s Valley Lodge Adventure” at 11:43pm.
Rather to Watson’s secret chagrin her story only got 38 Likes on Fiction Forum; but a day later a messenger left a package on the doorstep of the brownstone. If she’d had any questions about who had provided the strange box that looked something like a tabletop amplifier, the sticker reading “Use Only For Good” over the side-knob left no doubt.
She’d already decided on the number she’d collect. Infinite though parallel universes and alternate universes might be, collecting too many people turned them into a milling, useless mob or brainless army. Best to keep it down to a manageable handful of visitors, 3 or 4 altogether. And she needed more people who thought like her to magnify the brain power in the room, like multiple mirrors in a telescope.
She mentally steeled herself against the shock of running into her own visage changed a number of different ways, took hold of the knob, and turned it clockwise, once. Click.
A Deinonychus roared at her, raising one sickle-clawed hind foot to disembowel her.
Counter-clockwise, click. The dinosaur disappeared.
Joan re-read the instructions and readjusted the gauges, shaking just a little.
Take two.
Quarter-turn around, set. Click.
A white man in a rumpled tweed suit looked up at Joan from the stuffed chair where he’d collapsed. He was mustachioed and his outfit spoke of late-1800s fashion; he wore stockings but no shoes. His eyes were dark and bagged with weariness as he looked around the brownstone’s sitting-room before focusing on the woman in the room. His voice was level and low, with a London accent not unlike Sherlock’s, and clotted with the sound of one who has just come from sleep. “This is a peculiar dream. Why would I picture myself in a Chinese brothel?”
The hell. This couldn’t be right. “Your name?” she said, more sharply than she’d meant.
The man looked taken aback at her approach. But he answered. “Dr. John Watson, madam.”
John was the masculine derivative of Joan. So she was a white English man in this avatar – with the ignorant racism and misogyny of the era those clothes were from. Great.
Fortunately Joan’s reflexes were good. She put down her high-heeled foot immediately, using her operating-room command voice. “Sir, this is your world’s future. Everyone has electric lights, not just wealthy people. Fashions are far less restrictive on women’s clothing now. Further, I am an American citizen, and I am not a prostitute.”
The man’s eyes widened at the fierce flow of words. A flush came to his cheeks and he bowed his head. “Then I beg your forgiveness for my horrific lapse in manners and my frightful assumption regarding your profession, ma’am. I would not be rude to a lady, even in a dream.”
Victorian chivalry. She could work with that. “You are forgiven,” she said, keeping her voice strong. “And I apologize for the shock this must be to you. All will be explained soon.”
The man’s smile was heartbreakingly sad. “A shock like this is preferable to how I usually pass my days.”
Oh, not good. What had happened in her – his – world? Could he be in some version of the time she’d gone through right after Mycroft’s disappearance and Sherlock’s fleeing to MI6? Well, maybe there was something good in his mind that would help.
She reached for the knob again, spun it counterclockwise for a quarter of its circumference, and back. Instead of one click, though, she got a double-click.
Two appeared nearly on each other’s heels. White. Men again. They could have been twins, save that they looked as if they’d been born 15 years apart. One was a hale and hearty man with honey-colored hair, a kind smile and a jaunty trim to his moustache; the other looked older and more careworn around the eyes, missing more hair (and that remaining hair greyer than that of his counterpart), and a little shrunken in stature. Like the first man – who had begun to look around the room with curiosity – they were dressed in Victorian-era garb that, oddly, seemed to match their hair-colors (the younger in pale brown, the elder in gray). They started and stared at each other like a Groucho Marx mirror routine.
One more, she thought. Another woman would be nice this time, universe, someone from this century, maybe this continent too. Counter a full three turns. Halt. Click.
She jumped back as a gaunt young white man whirled around him, bringing up his walking stick and a clenched fist. The others exclaimed and moved out of reach as well. The newcomer braced himself, lurched, and used his stick to straighten again, eyes wide as a trapped raccoon’s.
Fresh from some traumatic experience, Joan deduced instantly. Pivoted like a soldier about-facing – must be a war-vet, and limping badly on one leg, possibly the injury that got him sent home. He was also wearing (shabbier, older) Victorian clothes, and his reactions were those of someone with PTSD. He reeked of beer and unwashed man’s-sweat; probably he’d been yanked from some pre-deodorant tavern. He was younger than all the others, if just as male and just as white; rawboned, face ravaged by recent illness, his clothes and sparse frame denoting poverty. “What the hell am I doing here?” he snapped. English.
“You’re helping me,” Joan said, again as calm as if she was presiding over touchy surgery. She was certainly not calm. Somehow in their worlds, every time, she was a Victorian English white male. What was even up with that?
The man squinted at her. “Is there a Tong war going on in this neighbourhood? Might explain why that madman dragged me out to watch him tonight…”
“Watch your language and show some respect, you feckless pup!” snapped Tweed before Joan could respond. It was the first spark of life she’d seen in him – and judging from the soldier’s startled reaction she wasn’t the only surprised one. “She is not a gangster, nor a demi-mondaine. Apologize to the lady at once!”
After his double-take, the ragged soldier faced Joan and gave a sharp, brief, military head-bow. “Apologies, miss.” A slight hiccup marred his response.
So. Tweed came back to life if there was someone else he could assist.
“All right, all of you,” she said in a command voice, making all of them face her despite the incredulous looks, and taking advantage of their disorientation to establish the upper hand. “I’m very sorry for this intrusion on your lives, but I need some like minds on a subject that I suspect is very near and dear to all of our hearts, because of the nature of our shared identity.”
Skeptical looks from the four Victorian-era white Englishmen facing someone alien to them in three ways – Chinese ancestry, American accent, woman.
She responded by fixing them all with an unwavering stare, longer than proper demure women would have in their time, and it worked; they looked away, uneasy. Only then did she speak again. “My name is Joan. Joan Watson. I was once a doctor.”
Ah. Now she had their attention. To their credit, after their startled looks they stayed silent – no snickering or the like at the thought of a woman of any race taking up their profession.
She continued. “Each one of you is a Doctor Watson as well. I have pulled you into my world where I am the Doctor Watson that you all are in your own worlds.” She waited to give them time to react, even though everything inside her was chanting hurry hurry hurry no time to lose no time –
“I’m definitely asleep,” said the man in tweed.
“I didn’t have that much to drink,” the young soldier muttered.
“By Jove!” the younger of the “twins” cried out, curiosity lighting up his face. “Perhaps that H.G. Wells fellow is on to something!” He once again turned to his counterpart in gray as if staring into a mirror, and realization filled him. “You look like … why you look like my father did when I was a boy! Or like …” One hand rose and unconsciously passed over his head of full brown hair as he looked at the sparser-haired man. “You poor old chap, are you me? Whatever have you seen?”
“Perhaps I should not say,” the older fellow said. His face was more lined and careworn than the younger man, but not as hollow-looking as the first man.
Enough. “Again, I am very sorry to take you from your rightful places, Doctors,” Joan said. “But I called you together because of the one thing we all have in common: Sherlock Holmes.”
And that got their attention again. Soldier rolled his eyes and groaned in agreement. Younger gaped and smiled in wonderment. Elder nodded wearily.
But the man in tweed closed his eyes as if weathering a blow. “Sherlock Holmes is dead,” he said softly, his voice flat and lifeless. “He is dead. I couldn’t recover his body.”
The other Watsons turned toward the solemn man behind them. The two younger men gaped.
Joan pressed her lips together, her heart in her throat. Who knows what slight changes in each world could lead to such an event – and whatever it was she had to make damn sure it didn’t happen here.
The older “twin” had a sad, understanding expression. “Where I am from, Sherlock Holmes was missing and presumed dead for three years,” he said. “I mourned him to the day he returned.” He looked at his incredulous younger self. “Now you know.”
Dead. Missing for three years. So many possibilities in these worlds. Joan clenched her fist rather than reach out to the device and summon another Watson from a place where Holmes was alive and well. “I need your help,” she said, stopping the chain of inquiry, “because in this world where we are – my world – Sherlock Holmes is missing.”
“Holmes?” Soldier shook his head. “He’s not dead nor missing. I’ve barely known the man a month now. I left him breaking heads in the Punch Bowl for our rent money – I’d lost my wound pension to a dice-cup.”
All the Watsons, even the somber Tweed, nodded with expressions that showed their understanding of that last situation. Joan gaped. They all had the same gambling addiction? But she didn’t have any kind of addiction, she helped others break theirs… Well. If you discounted her inability to stay away from dangerous situations and dangerous consulting detectives. All right, maybe she liked the adrenaline. Okay, maybe that actually was a form of gambling. Dammit.
She looked at them all, uneasy and afraid in this futuristic world. “Please stay here, gentlemen, and I’ll come back with tea for everyone first.”
All of them relaxed immediately at the magic word. Joan smiled. If there was one thing four white Englishmen from another century and a Chinese-American woman shared besides a surname, it was the sure knowledge that a cup of tea fixed everything.
Despite her request for them to stay, the younger “twin” in brown followed her to the kitchen, insisting on helping her, and gaped in delight at the refrigerator – did they even have iceboxes in his time yet? “These are also very good for preserving some medicines,” Joan told her alternate self/medical colleague. She forced herself to keep it at that, rather than spill the word about all the current medications for what were dangerous or fatal illnesses in his world – she couldn’t send all the Watsons back with sacks crammed full of penicillin and birth-control pills.
The tea worked its magic (even if the men made comical faces at both the teabags and the thick ceramic mugs rather than the fine porcelain cups they would have used), and all the men seated in the main room of the brownstone faced Joan where she sat in her chair by the fireplace, looking more at ease in this strange new world.
“From the beginning, then,” she said. “Some names and people may be familiar. Some may not.”
Her Sherlock Holmes had left two nights before in the company of Detective Bell (blank looks all around except for Tweed, who recalled a Dr. Joseph Bell in Edinburgh) to talk to a contact among the homeless of the city. (Nods all around at this familiar behavior from Holmes; “I came damn close to being one of those wretches,” Soldier said, and the other Watsons all nodded there too.) They’d headed to a diner for coffee, when one of the homeless women ran up to them and told Sherlock that “Jamie” had sent her. Sherlock had told Detective Bell to go on to the coffee shop and he’d join him soon, and left with the ragged woman. That was the last Bell had seen him, and not one text (“Er, message”) Joan had sent to him was returned.
Jamie, Joan told the assembled Watsons, meant only one thing to Sherlock Holmes: Moriarty.
Tweed’s face contorted in pure anger at the name. Soldier and Younger frowned in puzzlement, the name clearly meaning nothing to them.
Elder looked angry and disbelieving at the same time. “A woman? Possibly Moriarty’s daughter? The man himself is dead, at the site where he tried to kill Holmes and the reason Holmes went into hiding.”
“Dead,” echoed Tweed. “Dead where I am from as well. In a shared grave he does not deserve to hallow.”
Moriarty was a man in their worlds too, what a surprise. And dead in the same worlds with dead/missing Sherlock. A pattern was emerging, as well as a timeline; the two younger ones hadn’t found out about Moriarty yet.
She explained. Moriarty was a woman, yes. Evil, yes again. She had been in prison and had seemed to escape, and had contacts and informants everywhere. And her name on a contact’s lips had caused Sherlock to disappear.
Joan knew she was the one weakness of Moriarty’s, the one thing she could not comprehend in full. Joan also knew the importance of going big as opposed to going home. So if one Watson could neutralize one Moriarty, surely more Watsons would overwhelm that evil genius. Parallel universes or alternate worlds sounded like the kind of thing Everyone would know about, which was why she’d contacted them. “’Everyone’ is what we call our street informants,” she explained at the puzzled looks. "It’s a gang of sorts, of rogue scientists.”
“Charming,” Soldier said. “A flock of Frankensteins.” Joan couldn’t argue with that.
“And this woman Moriarty.” Elder looked at Joan earnestly. “Is she murderous as was the Professor we fled?”
“This Moriarty knows how to murder.” Joan thought of the “gift” Jamie had given her – Elana March, the crime boss who’d attempted to have Watson killed and had murdered her lover instead, found dead in her cell without a mark on her. “Bad things happen to her enemies, and yet so little gets traced back to her.”
“A spider in a web,” Elder agreed. Tweed closed his eyes in pain at that term.
“But there is one line she will not, seemingly cannot cross.” Joan thought of the fascination Jamie Moriarty held for her partner – a fascination nearly identical with the one she herself had. “She will not kill Sherlock Holmes.”
Soldier smirked. “So this she-villain is a real woman after all. She can’t bring herself to kill a man she loves.”
“Women kill their lovers a hundred times a day, child,” Tweed said sharply. "It may also surprise you to learn that women can feel other things toward men besides love or romantic jealousy.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Joan replied – a little bemused that the quietest, saddest man in this Victorian cabal seemed to have a better grasp of women than the others, even if it was occasionally tinged with racism. “You’re right. It’s not romantic love between them. I think it’s fascination with how each other’s minds work, despite their knowing that it’s a dangerous thing to contemplate.”
Soldier’s eyebrow lifted. “Sounds like Holmes, all right.”
Elder nodded. “He does at times seem to miss having the Professor as an opponent that’s his intellectual equal.”
“That attraction can be fatal to both,” Tweed reminded them.
“There’s another connection here, that’s as strong. I don’t know if you two shared it,” Joan addressed Elder and Tweed. “Moriarty in this world seems to have a separate fascination for me. Or obsession. I caught her in a trap she didn’t foresee – she’d underestimated me. She might expect me to follow her, or she did this deliberately to get me to find her, using Sherlock as bait.” Okay, that was a little funny – all four men following along but then looking shocked at her using her partner’s first name.
Elder recovered first. “No. No, the Professor had no interest in me at all. He even sent a messenger to …” he looked at his younger self and stopped. “No. I was a mere impediment.”
“He tricked me into deserting my post,” Tweed said, and said no more; the memory clearly hurt him.
Joan looked at her bizarre tea party, and instead of seeing four Victorian white men she now arranged them chronologically in her mind. Soldier, the newcomer who’d just befriended Sherlock Holmes; Younger, settled in with Sherlock Holmes but still not badly marked by the world; Elder, sadder and wiser and stronger where a temporary loss had marked him; Tweed, buried in grief at his permanent loss. Four versions of herself – a traumatized ex-surgeon seeking only to be useful since she was not happy, settling in to discover a joy in sharing her partner’s work, recovering from the times when she missed this man and this work like a lost limb, uneasy but resolute; and she would not be that last man.
“Doctors,” she said. "When you’ve finished your tea, I’d like you to come to the workroom.”
***
It was a bit crowded in her basement office. They loved the whiteboard she had set up in there, and her laptop and other machines got plenty of wistful looks too, but she stuck with the basic building blocks of the craft of detection.
She took the black marker from where Soldier was sniffing it. “Sherlock Holmes is missing. Moriarty has something to do with it. What can she gain from all this? Any and all ideas are good, no matter how strange.”
She let them talk and began to scribble. “A hostage.” “Ransom.” “Control over you.” “Forced marriage.” “A prisoner to torment.” “Where is the water closet?” (“Indoor toilet over there,” she directed Tweed.) “An experimental subject.” “She needs a spy, and plans to control his mind somehow.” “Is she a mathematics professor? Are women even permitted to be college professors? Might she require an assistant?” “Why are we talking, dammit? Let’s just arrest her now – might be able to thrash a confession out of her or one of her cohorts.” (“That’s not how we do things here,” she told Soldier, and tamped down the nasty part of her mind wholeheartedly agreeing with him.)
The doorbell sounded above. She pulled out her phone and saw the missed message where Bell said he was coming over with takeout. “Marcus,” Joan said out loud. And looked at her squad, who’d also noted the bell. “I’ll go get Detective Bell.”
“Isn’t that for the housekeeper to do?” Tweed asked, and the others nodded.
"It’s her day off.” Oh this was going to be such fun, unless she nipped it in the bud. “Gentlemen, before we proceed any further in meeting a new person, listen to me. Detective Marcus Bell is a colleague of both Sherlock Holmes and myself, and a dear friend as well. He is Afri- He is black.” Joan smiled sweetly at her bevy of Watsons. “And if one of you says a single thing to him about his race – even if you think it’s a compliment – I’ll rip off all your mustaches.”
Four white men became even whiter. Oh yes. That fear and recognition on their faces meant that they knew and believed she was a Watson too – and she’d do exactly that.
“He is a police detective. That’s all you need to concern yourselves about. Do not touch anything until I return.” She went upstairs and got the door. “Marcus, please come in.”
“Joan, hey.” Bell hefted a bagged cardboard box with a smile; it wafted the mouth-watering pastry-meat smell of empanadas. “How you holding up?”
“About as well as you’d expect. Trying a new approach to the problem,” she replied truthfully.
“So I see,” Bell said, looking over her shoulder with his best deadpan expression.
Joan turned around to see all four men at the top of the stairs. “Didn’t feel right, a lady having a gentleman over without a chaperone,” Tweed rumbled and the others echoed.
“Good evening, Detective Bell,” Younger said with a wide grin, stepping forward and extending his hand.
"It was afternoon when I came here,” Soldier said.
“Mid-morning for me,” Elder added.
"It was night-time. I was asleep,” Tweed finished, indicating his rumpled clothes and stocking feet. “I haven’t been sleeping well for some time.”
Joan turned back to Bell.
“I’m guessing this has nothing to do with jet lag,” was all he said, looking at the four mustachioed white men. “Always something going on in New York.”
“New York? Are we in America?” Younger exclaimed delightedly. The others clamored in similar fashion.
Joan facepalmed. Oh, right. Details. She lifted her head to face Det. Bell’s narrow-eyed gaze, and smiled. “Marcus. Do you think you’re ready for a whole new level of weirdness involving Sherlock and me?”
Marcus Bell looked once more at what appeared to be a barbershop quartet in mustaches and quaint suits, and back at Joan. "Is a Delorean involved in any of this?”
“Or Rufus’ phone booth,” Joan conceded. “Something like that.”
To his credit, Marcus Bell took that information in stride. He faced the men, face stern. “Just tell me you guys aren’t slaveowners.”
“Perish the thought, young man!” Tweed said indignantly, and the others agreed in chorus. “My parents proudly supported the Northern Unionists in that righteous war!”
Marcus’ face was expressionless. “…Thanks.”
Amused despite herself, Joan turned to her bevy of Watsons and saw them surreptitiously inhaling as the delicious pastries made their presence known. “Let’s all sit at the kitchen table and have something to eat.” Even she was hungry now.
“Oh, you must see the refrigerator!” Younger told the other Watsons.
An impromptu tour of a modern kitchen segued into an introduction to empanadas (Bell had fortunately brought a full dozen, enough for everybody including himself).
“I brought in this group because they think a certain way that may help me focus on where Sherlock went,” Joan explained.
“Frankly, anything would help right now,” Bell conceded. “No footprints, fingerprints, blood traces, DNA – it’s like Sherlock vanished into thin air.”
Joan held still. The four men she’d conjured out of thin air were still eating (and exchanging stories of meals in India and Afghanistan). What, exactly, did the situation look like from where she’d taken them? Were they, too, missed and searched for as she hunted for Sherlock?
Was it even the same Moriarty Joan knew who’d targeted Sherlock, or was it one from their world – one where Moriarty was a man and called Professor? Except there was the problem of technology, and nanodevices were definitely not possible with Victorian machinery.
So. Improbable, but with impossibilities eliminated, that meant that Jamie Moriarty very likely had access to this type of device too.
And if it could pull something or someone from another time or another world…could it also serve as a teleport, pulling someone from that person’s same world, working sideways rather than straight forward? She hadn’t noticed that in her reading of the instructions.
And if she had such a device to do this…was Jamie Moriarty also doing what Joan had just done? For a moment of panic Joan thought about Jamie summoning other Moriartys to pool their geniuses and resources to some horrific end – but in the next moment dismissed that completely. If she’d learned nothing else from current events, it was that venal sociopaths did not work well together – they were so greedy and selfish that they turned on each other in a heartbeat like sharks devouring an injured shark during a feeding frenzy. Jamie was not only intelligent but self-aware; she’d know herself to be of that nature, and very likely avoid it altogether.
But – what about the other Sherlocks? And could she be collecting them? More people to use for some horrific undertaking of hers?
If another device was involved, that meant…
Excusing herself from the table for a minute (and unable to prevent all the Watsons from rising as a woman stood to leave them, to Marcus’ bemusement), Joan headed back down to fetch her laptop.
More future shock for the Watson quartet, as Joan powered up the machine; “Give it another hundred years, guys,” Bell said to the barrage of questions. "It’s all math, it all boils down to math – ones and zeroes. Look, talk to Ada Lovelace when you get back.”
Joan attached Moriarty’s mug shot and priors via email to her contact. “Do you track who has these devices?” she sent.
OF COURSE, replied Everyone. SHE ISN’T IN OUR DATABASE.
“Check her list of associates and known contacts in that file.”
A longer pause. SOME OF US REALLY LIKED THAT STORY OF YOURS. DO A SEQUEL? 2000W.
And it was really wrong of Joan to think two things nearly at the same time – 1) They have information that will help me track her down and find Sherlock, and 2) They liked it they liked it!
“These mincemeat pasties are superb,” Soldier said and the others agreed (Tweed had actually finished one). “I didn’t know Americans could cook anything besides turkey.”
“Immigration helps,” Bell said. “Joan, any luck?”
“I think I may have a lead soon, Marcus,” Joan called over her shoulder from where she stood at the kitchen counter with her laptop, fingers flying. “Quick question. If you were a talking pony, how would you fend off a vampire?”
Bell and all the other Watsons looked at each other. “The poor girl has brain-fever,” Tweed said.
“That’s not even a thing,” Bell said, “and I think you’re right.”
***
Cars, telephones, and underground public transportation were part of everyday life for all the Watsons. However, they were not prepared for the small size and portability of the telephones, the speed of the vehicles, and the sheer volume and variety of humanity on an NYC subway. “This underground train smells better than the London one,” Tweed said to everyone’s agreement; Joan didn’t want to think of what that said about 1880s-era transport. The four men in Victorian clothes (Tweed wearing a borrowed pair of Sherlock’s shoes) blended right in with the drag queens, street performers, turbaned Sikhs, pierced and tattooed skateboarders, women in hijabi, people with Midwestern accents wearing shirts and hats displaying NYC points of interest, and Hasidic scholars in black.
From the station it was a short walk to the strip-mall that was their target – enough for the Watsons to gape like any other tourists at the tall buildings around them, even in this off-Manhattan neighborhood.
A thin white man in his 40s was closing a shop called Batteries and Bulbs when he found himself surrounded by five Watsons. “George Vasarnian,” Joan said to the thin man. “I’d like to talk to you about a device you obtained from the Internet for your main employer – the one responsible for the paychecks that get deposited in the Cayman Islands.”
Vasarnian looked at the anachronisms around his shop counter. “I don’t –“
“The mechanism that you handed off to Jamie Moriarty,” Tweed said in a voice of iron. “The one she has been using to steal others from their rightful places for no good purpose. Tell us.” His voice rang like a general’s, and Vasarnian practically snapped to attention. Joan bit back a frustrated sigh; even in this modern time, a man’s voice was more readily listened to and obeyed than a woman’s. She tried to accept Tweed’s assistance as helpful for both of them.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” George sneered. “Now get out of my face or I’ll have you arrested.”
“NYPD,” Bell said, producing his ID. “Maybe you should answer the questions they’re posing.”
A long pause. “Look, I’m just a go-between.”
“A poor excuse,” snapped Younger indignantly. “You knew she’d misuse the device.”
“For twenty mil I don’t give a rat’s ass what she does with it,” Vasarnian snapped back.
“Twenty million.” Soldier blinked. “That’s 4 million pounds sterling. There are lords that aren’t that rich.”
“I suppose this shopkeeping is to help you make ends meet,” Elder said snidely.
“A front for one of her money-laundering sites,” Joan said, nodding. “Very low-key. Let me know where she is.” Her own voice borrowed the steel from Tweed’s tone.
“You can’t do anything to me.” Vasarnian’s face changed as the hand in his pocket moved around, groping in vain.
Joan smiled at him and held up his phone. “Looking for this? You were going to signal her.”
“Oh, well done!” Younger said delightedly. Soldier lifted an eyebrow and tapped his lips with a forefinger, clearly pondering the benefits of learning such a skill.
“Again,” Joan said, and made her voice steel. “Where is she.”
Vasarnian smirked at her. “Let’s see. Horrors unimaginable if I talk, or absolutely nothing at all if I don’t. Decisions, decisions. You can put me in a cell for a day or two but you got nothing on me. Now either shit or get off the pot, it’s dinnertime and I’m hungry.”
Elder seized Soldier’s wrist just as he lifted his stick and quelled him with a firm grip and a stern look into lowering his weapon. “Horrors unimaginable, you say?” he began, turning to the man with a pleasant smile. “We don’t need to imagine them. Tell me, Mr. Vasarnian. How much do you know of combat surgery?”
All the other Watsons smiled – Joan included. Especially when she saw the flicker of something like fear in the man’s eyes.
"There are things you’ll never forget,” Elder continued. “Such as stuffing a screaming man’s guts back into his belly while trying to sew it shut at the same time.”
Vasarnian went white.
“Blood and bile and pus everywhere,” Joan added.
“Pulling out a tattered piece of meat that used to be a stomach, still attached to a living man,” Younger said, eyes distant.
Vasarnian went green.
“Getting three other men to hold him down so you can saw off his arm while he’s pissing and shitting himself for pain and cursing you,” Soldier said.
“And that’s completely leaving out the explosions and artillery flying around you,” Tweed reminded him.
“Fountain of blood hitting you in the face,” Joan chimed in.
“Finding a man’s body in an empty building when he’s been dead for three days in 100-degree weather,” added Detective Bell, who clearly had plenty of his own type of war stories. “When it’s more like a man-shaped pile of maggots.”
Vasarnian went mottled – red, white, bilious.
“Finding an entire village full of man-shaped maggot piles,” Soldier put in. “You never forget that smell, no matter how much you drink.” He and Marcus exchanged a look and a nod.
“We can do this all day,” Joan said.
“We have lots of stories we never write down,” Younger added.
"It’s a damn bloody relief to talk about it, too,” Soldier said, grinning.
“You won’t be able to eat meat for a year by the time we’re done talking,” Tweed said cheerily.
“We haven’t even started talking about the infections,” said Joan. “You won’t want to eat anything at all for a week.”
“Then there’s the diseases,” Elder reminded them, and cleared his throat as if to deliver a lecture to a hall full of students. “The first symptom of trenchfoot is–“
Vasarnian talked – practically gave them Moriarty’s GPS coordinates. Bell called in a black-and-white to get him booked in solitary for protection. And no need to feed the prisoner, no.
“Nicely done, everyone,” Joan said as they watched the squad car drive off.
“Apologies for the language, miss,” Soldier said, blushing.
Detective Bell smirked.
“I was a doctor too – I’ve been up to my elbows in human effluvia, even if I haven’t seen the horrors of a war zone,” Joan reminded Soldier. There was a touch of sweetness hiding in that gaunt young man. A pity; if he was better fed and healthier he’d be drop-dead gorgeous… Focus, Joan, focus. She brought up her own phone with the information Vasarnian had spilled and called up a map. “So she’s hiding out in France. And she definitely has a device like the one I used to disrupt your lives.”
“Please don’t feel bad about that, ma’am,” Tweed said. “This ‘disruption’ is the best diversion I’ve had in over a year.” He gazed in envy and wonder at the small rectangle in Joan’s hand. “A library’s worth of reading material, maps of the whole world, automatic calculations, a clock, education from every nation, instantaneous communication – what an age to live in, where such a thing fits in one’s pocket!”
Joan smiled. “Unfortunately, my fellow Watson, human nature has not changed one bit since your time. What do you think is the single greatest use of this item in the world?”
Soldier shook his head with his own rueful grin. “Pornography,” he replied.
Detective Bell and Joan nodded at him.
“Disgraceful,” Younger snapped, blushing; Elder nodded firmly, sans blush.
Joan hefted her phone. “Just as the device I used to call you in to help me could likely summon the greatest thinkers of the world to pool their resources across time, but Moriarty used it to snatch away…”
Snatch away. Or lock away.
“Miss?” Younger said.
“Joan?” Bell asked. “You were saying?”
Joan Watson looked at Tweed – Dr. Watson – hollow-eyed with grief after his Sherlock Holmes had confronted their Moriarty (score: both dead). Younger and Elder – Dr. Watson, one individual from one world but from two different dates – who’d gone from jovial youth to grey sorrow after a different Moriarty and their Sherlock Holmes had clashed (score: Moriarty dead, Holmes driven into hiding for years avoiding retaliation). And there was Soldier – Dr Watson, recently discharged from wartime service – just beginning his friendship with his Holmes and as unaware of Moriarty as was Younger.
In each case, over and over, Moriarty drawn to Holmes and as unable to resist that attraction as Watson. Drawn by hate, fascination, grudging admiration for another powerful intellect, desire to bend that will and that brain to their own self-regarding ends – in Jamie’s case wanting to keep him around to play with, puzzle with, match wits, defeat, reflect her own genius back to her.
Joan’s squad provided examples of two worlds where Moriarty was driven to kill Holmes, or to make the attempt. But here and now was a Moriarty who could not and would not kill either Holmes or Watson.
Maybe, in her own twisted way, Jamie Moriarty was collecting Sherlock Holmeses to keep them safe from their Moriartys – and had probably snatched Sherlock just because she could, or as a practice of the device. He would be the crown jewel of her bizarre zoo.
…And if the device could pull sideways…could it also push sideways?
“Joan?” Bell said. “You’re grinning about something.”
“You were saying something, Miss Watson,” Elder prompted her.
For just a split-second Joan hesitated, unsure if she should ask them –
Idiot. They’re YOU.
She looked the others in the eyes. “Watsons,” she said. “Do you mind taking another unnatural trip? I’m planning an assault on Moriarty’s stronghold. I think I know how to find where she’s holding Sherlock Holmes captive.”
“I’m with you,” Tweed said first, and the others chorused affirmative.
Joan beamed at Det. Bell. “Care to go to France tomorrow, Marcus?”
“In the DeLorean?” A second later the automatic denial left his expression. “Do you need me along for backup?”
“No, we’ll be fine,” she said. “But thank you for the offer. We may need you at home, holding the other end of the clothesline. Back to the brownstone.”
***
Bell promised to return the next morning.
Dinner was Italian takeout, much to the delight of the other Watsons. They also all loved the shower.
Between the sofa, the guest room, and Sherlock’s bed there was enough space for everyone to sleep, and Sherlock’s eclectic wardrobe provided sleepwear for everyone. They all dropped off rapidly, even Tweed now that he had a purpose – soldiers clearly learned early to snatch sleep whenever it was available.
Joan took the instructions to bed and re-read them – and in the fine print and only in German was the heading “Seitwärtsfahrt” (“sideways travel”), with the instructions.
Next morning she was up early and jogging in place to settle her nerves. She dressed in a comfortable top-skirt combination with sturdy heeled boots. Her guests were up and packing food and other supplies for the trip – everything was wonderful to them, including the sliced bread.
When Bell showed up, Joan gave him the rundown on the basics of working the device. She plugged in the locale from her phone, and the internal clicking as the device began to recalibrate sent butterflies to her stomach. She was really going to do this.
“Watson, where do you keep your revolver?” Tweed asked her.
“I don’t have one,” Joan replied.
“Is there any place in America where we might obtain firearms?”
Joan and Bell looked at each other. Joan shook her head. “This will be the element of surprise,” Joan went on, “and we’ve got some non-projectile weapons we can bring.”
“I’m armed.” Soldier pulled apart his walking-stick to reveal a sword.
"Good,” Joan said. “Also, before we start our trip…”
By the time the last Watson had finished in the bathroom, Joan and Marcus had collected two singlesticks, two collapsible batons, and a Taser that she kept for herself. The ease with which the male Watsons took up the weapons and hefted them spoke of their Army backgrounds. Tweed, especially, looked like a thunderstorm and he gripped the singlestick as if it were a cutlass.
Ping. The device was done. She took her phone back. “We’ll call when we’re ready to come back,” she told Bell. “Everybody going, stay together right there.” She set the timer on the device and walked over to the spot she’d marked with duct tape.
Soldier grinned savagely. “The game’s afoot: Follow your spirit, and on this charge –“
“We’re here,” Joan interrupted. They were standing in the middle of a field of lavender. The midday summer sun of south France blazed down on them. “Holy crap, it actually worked.”
“This doesn’t look like a criminal’s lair,” Younger said, looking around at the pale purple flowers.
Joan looked at her phone, and changed position. “Northwest, approximately half a mile. We walk.”
It was a lovely day for a stroll in the warm sun amid the fragrant blooms. What at first looked like a break in the field turned out to be a small dirt road. “This is the strangest battlefield charge I’ve ever done,” Soldier said, looking up at a passing butterfly.
But at the sight of a large walled estate coming into view minutes into their walk, the sole building in the locale, the male Watsons all started moving in an unconscious march. Joan, at their head, settled for the head-high stride that carried a small-statured Chinese-American woman fearlessly through the cat-calling streets of NYC. Her heart beat like a drum. I’m nearly there, Sherlock – and I know you’re trusting me to find you. Brains were better than brawn, but just at the moment she wished she could have a quick meeting between her baton and Moriarty’s skull. “If someone starts shooting, get into the fields,” she said.
Except that…no one shot at them. No one stood guard at the closed wrought-iron gate, nor along the wall. A quick look with the binoculars she’d brought showed no sign of human beings around the perimeter of the splendid house – which otherwise looked custom-made for Moriarty’s liking.
“I don’t like this,” Elder said. Joan nodded, pulling out her lockpicks – the hard plastic ones – and, donning gloves, began to work on the gate lock. There were several possibilities and no good ones came to mind. The gate clicked and she pushed it open with one gloved hand. “Be careful not to touch the metal gates,” she said, and led them in.
The emptiness of the grounds – no vehicles near the garage, a large flat marked pad clearly meant for a helicopter that was nowhere in sight – suggested desertion. A goose chase from that smirking money-launderer? She swallowed her panic. They’d do a search of the house, and only then –
The house door swung open. Joan sucked in a breath made of adrenaline and gripped her Taser, ready to run forward with a yell of rage.
“Watson!” a voice called. And a figure stood in the doorway – a rumpled, tattooed, familiar figure. “Tell your army of dopplegangers to stand down!”
And she did run anyway, whooping – followed by a cheer from the men running behind her.
It was Sherlock. Her Sherlock. And he wasn’t alone. Three other men and a woman stood with him in the courtyard, in clothing old and modern – Victorian dress and bustle, grey dressing-gown, lederhosen, long black coat – that bore the same rumpled, unwashed look to them as his own T-shirt and jeans. But there was no mistaking the intelligent piercing eyes of master deducers in all of them.
She heard a gasp behind her, from Tweed. Then a thud. The other Watsons stopped.
The Sherlock Holmeses moved forward toward the Watsons – and what would have been an extremely emotional reunion between Joan and Sherlock was diverted toward the collapsed man in their midst, and the tall blond hawk-nosed Sherlock Holmes in lederhosen bending over him. “Watson?” he called softly, patting the unconscious Tweed on the cheek. “Watson.”
Elder glared down at the tableaux. “Sigerson the Norwegian explorer, I presume.”
The blond Holmes jerked his head up and stared at Elder, right next to an equally glaring Younger.
“Let’s get him inside and resting until he comes to,” Joan said, taking over and smoothly diverting attention toward taking care of the fallen man. “You three.” And she saw how Elder elbowed aside the blond Holmes to take his place to lift Tweed and carry him into the empty house, forcing the latter to trail behind the impromptu litterbearers. She and her Sherlock stood shoulder to shoulder, watching everyone else go in.
Almost everyone. The female Sherlock Holmes stood with them and said something in Russian, with a tone of disdain.
“You said it, sister,” Joan replied, not knowing in the slightest what she’d just said. “Let’s hear it, Sherlock.”
“Inside,” he said, and repeated it in Russian for the benefit of the other Holmes.
***
They got Tweed lying on what looked like a sofa stolen from Versailles. Joan confirmed that it was indeed just unconsciousness and shock and not a heart attack or aneurism that had felled the poor man; he was already stirring awake. “Water,” Joan said firmly to all the Victorians before they could go get brandy. “Water only.” The blond Holmes insisted on tending the man himself; the others left the pair a little privacy for their reunion and convened in a magnificent dining-room nearby.
All sat at the bare table in the elegant room and made things clear. Yes, it was Moriarty, the Holmeses confirmed – the Russian practically spitting the name – the female Moriarty Joan and her Sherlock knew and whom Sherlock had also known by her artist alias of Irene Adler. Jamie Moriarty. This was apparently one of her boltholes all over the world.
Yes, she had dragged them all away and penned them in this house, via the strange little box. “This Moriarty woman had planned to use us against each other, I believe,” the hawk-nosed fellow in the gray dressing gown said calmly. “And failing that, to hold our Watsons’ fates as a bargaining chip. All to attempt to make at least a few of us join her syndicate.”
“She is extremely intelligent,” Sherlock said. “But a sociopath at the core.” (He then translated for the Russian, even as Elder muttered that ’villain’ covered that idea without all this Freud talk.)
Joan nodded. “A sociopath will do anything for self – lie, cheat, steal, kill – and simply doesn’t understand the concept of honor or courage. She didn’t or couldn’t realize that no amount of money, power or fame would turn Sherlock Holmes in any time or place to aiding and abetting evil.”
“Not even fear for Watson's life,” said the dressing-gowned Sherlock Holmes. “I know that my friend would rather die than see me turn against everything I’ve ever believed in. And I’d rather die than lose his belief in me.” He said it in the same calm way he’d recite a scientific formula.
The unpaired Watsons and Holmeses at the table all nodded in agreement.
From the next room, quiet tender words became Tweed’s angry raised voice and “Sigerson’s” pleading tone. Elder smiled grimly at the sound. Joan was a little amused, but mostly relieved that Sherlock Holmes hadn’t really been dead in Tweed’s world either. “They’ll work it out,” Elder said, and the longcoated Holmes nodded. "It won’t be easy, but they’ll become stronger.”
Then Elder looked sad again. “And I have proof that Sherlock Holmes would rather be dead to the world than have his Watson endangered due to his work, also.” The longcoated Sherlock Holmes bowed his head, nodding over his tight-laced fingers.
“Which doesn’t explain why there’s no Moriarty here,” said Joan. “Nor why there aren’t about a hundred more Sherlock Holmeses running around this place, if she had that device.”
“Once I’d ascertained the cause of our peculiar situation,” her Sherlock said, “something Everyone has been postulating about for some time now, I communicated to my fellows via wall-taps that we were all essentially the same person and we needed to force her hand, that her threats against Watson were pure bluff as she could not bring herself to harm you. After that it became child’s play to organize a break out of our different cells, subdue her guards, and destroy the device.”
“Sherlock!” Joan shouted. “She won’t touch ME, but she could have easily killed the other Watsons without batting an eye!”
The other Holmeses looked horrified. The Watsons shrugged.
"It worked,” her Holmes said simply. “And in acting as we did, we proved we were not only ungovernable, but unstoppable. Her inability to kill me forced her hand too – she fled, as she often does when one of her plans falls through. By now she’s far from here and lying low. And she has no device. Unlike us.” With a nod, he acknowledged the army of Watsons.
“So we have been here, sans this Moriarty, for 2 days,” confirmed Longcoat.
The Russian Holmes angrily spoke and Sherlock translated. “She also left us with no food, electricity nor means of communication for that same time. We were just short of drawing straws to see who’d get eaten first when we saw you.”
“Good God!” exclaimed Younger, and immediately hoisted his knapsack on the table. “Why didn’t you say so earlier – er, Holmes? We made sandwiches.” The other Watsons followed suit.
So this gorgeous estate had essentially been an unlocked prison in the middle of nowhere for the Holmeses, even with no Moriarty to hold them; Joan felt a good deal less ridiculous about her war party.
Realizing that not only “Sigerson” but the grieving Tweed had not eaten much recently (Tweed had finished only one of the empanadas and had picked at his ravioli), she left the genteel feeding frenzy and took her knapsack to the living room, tapping on the door to announce herself. Both men were now sitting side by side on the divan, stiff and angry and uncomfortable in a pained silence. “Eat something,” she said, putting her sandwiches on the side-table, and left them to rejoin the others in the dining room. All the Victorian males stood when she took her seat; the Russian woman, Longcoat and her Sherlock kept eating.
“Yes, we do have the same sort of device back at the brownstone,” Joan confirmed when she sat back down. “I also have my phone, so once I call Detective Bell he can recall us, and we can return everyone to their proper places and times.”
Her Sherlock nodded. “I told everyone you would find us, Watson.”
“Not trying to find you was not an option,” she responded in the same tone.
Elder nodded firmly, and looked at his younger self. “To hell with worrying about my existence if things change. Listen, younger me. When you get that note at Reichenbach, and don’t find his body? Don’t go home mourning him. Go to Florence and meet him there, and together you can perhaps avoid this grief and pain.” Longcoat nodded firmly.
Younger looked bewildered, but nodded. Then smiled a little. “I just might save you from losing that hair.”
Hawknose and Longcoat burst out laughing – as did the Russian after Sherlock had translated. “Good old Watson!” Hawknose said.
Joan smiled, moved at this proof that possibly one timeline would avoid the heartache being roughly mended in the next room. “Once we’re finished eating we’ll go home. Gather whatever you need. I’ll get the other two. Where is the device, by the way?”
Sherlock showed her the remains, which now just looked like a pile of plastic shards and snapped circuit boards; Joan scooped them into her knapsack before going into the next room.
Tweed and Sigerson were still sitting in silence, but now they both looked quiet and sad. But the haunted look was gone from Tweed’s face, and he looked better already even angry as he was. There was also not a crumb left of either sandwich. Both looked up when Joan came in and arose to follow her without a word.
“Unfortunately I can’t send you both home together,” she said. “You’ll have to go back to exactly where you both were when you were grabbed. But at least you know the truth.”
“And I can lie on paper easily enough, Holmes,” Tweed said icily. “I am a fiction writer, after all. I will mourn you extensively in my story about Reichenbach, and keep my knowledge that you live to myself.”
His disguised Holmes nodded. “You may…go to my brother’s club to obtain updates on my progress. Tell him that Sigerson sent you, and he will let you know anything you like.”
Tweed jerked his head in a nod of his own.
Once all were gathered together, Joan sent a text. Five minutes later the estate was deserted.
Two minutes after that Detective Bell was on the phone ordering several large pizzas to handle the sudden crowd in the brownstone.
***
Sending back the Watsons was easy – Joan simply reversed the same moves she’d used to obtain them – and they vanished one by one. All of them made their farewells to Joan, and in Soldier’s case he snapped off a salute to his temporary commander; she wasn’t sure of military protocol, so she nodded acknowledgement before sending him back to the Punch Bowl’s fighting pit. Tweed and Sigerson kept their eyes on each other till they were parted.
Carefully calibrating the places and times for the Holmeses took longer, and Joan took her time, remembering the dinosaur. This gave all of the former captives a much-needed respite in which to make up for 2 days of hunger, lost sleep, unheated showers and grimy clothes. The Victorians loved the washing machine and were quite angry that they couldn’t bring it back with them, especially the Russian (“This would save women weeks of work every year! Weeks!”).
THANKS FOR THE UPDATE, Everyone replied to Joan’s filling them in on the loss of Moriarty’s device. WE’VE GOT HER CONTACTS ON THE NO-BUY LIST FROM NOW ON. WHEN YOU’RE DONE, BOX UP THE THING AND LEAVE IT ON YOUR DOORSTEP ALONG WITH THE REST OF THE OTHER ONE, WE’LL TAKE CARE OF IT FROM THERE. ANY CHANCE OF A SEQUEL TO YOUR STORY? Joan shut down her laptop.
As Joan and Sherlock calculated every place on the dial to send the Holmeses back, their visitors took their leave one by one. The blond Sherlock Holmes who had been taken from halfway up the Matterhorn was the last to go.
“The one piece of advice I can give my other self,” Sherlock said to the man, “is to keep the lines of communication open.”
“If it involves Watson,” said Joan Watson, “then talk to Watson. Keep yourself safe, and go home to him when you can.”
He nodded. “That, I have finally deduced for myself. I appreciate the reinforcement. Best wishes in this brave new world.” And he was gone.
Joan exhaled. “Sherlock, we owe Marcus a dinner for him and a date at Per Se.”
“Agreed.”
She looked at him and smiled a little. "You once said that there is room in the world for only one Holmes and only one Watson. It’s kind of nice to know we’re not the most dysfunctional version of that pairing.”
He merely lifted one eyebrow. “I would still like to know where that one Sherlock Holmes found that coat.”
The next day, when Joan brought the repackaged device outside to leave on the stoop for Everyone’s pickup, a manila envelope lay on the step; the scrawl “To my dearest Joan Watson” in a familiar hand on the front drove the breath from her lungs. But she picked it up and took it inside, shouting for her partner.
A note with no prints, plain paper. Joan swallowed her apprehension and felt the cool armor enclose her that she needed to mentally wear whenever she dealt with this woman. They read the note together (Joan wearing the gloves she’d used to pick the lock at a possibly electrified gate).
By now, my dear Joan, you must have retrieved Sherlock Holmes and all the avatars I hosted. Not all one’s projects can end in success, I’m afraid – and underestimating an opponent such as yourself or even Sherlock can be a fatal flaw which I must work to remove. In my defense I will only say that human capital is a tricky asset to manage, and that one can occasionally have too much of a good thing. I’ll have better luck next time. Maybe I’ll even impress you at last.
Yours,
Jamie Moriarty
“In your dreams, you twisted –” Joan muttered out loud to the note, and Sherlock hid a smile as his partner handed the note off to him with two fingers, not looking at it a second time. “Here. We need kindling.”
“As you wish.” Sherlock headed off to do her bidding. “Congratulations on that work in replacing everyone – if you did your work correctly, all the displaced from other timelines will find no change at all in their status.”
“Maybe a hiccup here and there,” Joan said. “But I think I got them all sorted.”
***
“Where’d you go, old boy?” Holmes was bloody and filthy and covered with sweat – and grinning as he clutched a fistful of notes. “Lost you for a moment in the crowd.”
“Must have tripped over someone,” Watson said. “Is there enough there to go to Marcini’s? I’d love some Italian.”
***
Watson still dozed before the fire, fingers laced over his belly. Holmes smiled and picked up the newspaper he’d dropped.
***
Holmes still dozed before the fire, violin and bow slipping from his fingers. Watson walked over to rescue the instrument.
***
“Did you say something, Shirley?” Jane Watson queried, her back to her employer’s desk.
“No, nothing at all,” Holmes said, and resettled her chair, smiling.
***
“Next time you sulk in your bloody room for three days, tell me!” John shouted when Sherlock walked out of his bedroom, and Sherlock grinned.
***
He awoke from the deepest sleep he’d enjoyed in over a year and stretched in fragile bliss.
What a bizarre dream he’d had – copies of himself and Holmes, from the future and even from America, and one was a Chinese woman, and Sherlock Holmes not dead but only in exile hunting down Moriarty’s gang, and Moriarty a woman keeping everyone a prisoner in France. And being angry with Holmes who was blond and dressed as a Norwegian, and eating sandwiches in that French house, and Holmes telling him to talk to Mycroft.
Dream only, of course. Sherlock Holmes was dead and his body lost forever to the Reichenbach cauldron, forced to share a grave with the criminal he’d hunted. He’d probably dreamed of strange foreign food because he couldn’t remember the last full meal he’d eaten.
He sat up on the sofa where he’d lain down to rest.
Something crinkled in his pocket. He reached a hand in and pulled out a crumpled piece of waxed paper containing bread crumbs and the lingering smell of a ham sandwich.
He was still for a full minute, eliminating the impossible and accepting the improbable.
Then Dr. John Watson rose to wash and change his clothing. He had a visit to make to the Diogenes Club, and he planned to ask its founder about Sigerson.
THE END
DRAMATIS WATSONAE:
Tweed – Canon Watson (as portrayed by ACD and Sidney Paget)
Younger – Granada Watson, Seasons 1-2 (David Burke)
Elder – Granada Watson, Seasons 3 – on (Edward Hardwicke)
Soldier – Guy Ritchie films (Jude Law)
Joan – CBS Elementary (Lucy Liu)
DRAMATIS HOLMESAE:
“Sigerson” – Canon Holmes (ACD, Sidney Paget)
Hawknose – 20th-Century Fox & Universal Films (Basil Rathbone)
Longcoat – BBC Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch)
Russian – My Dearly Beloved Detective (Yekaterina Vasilyevna)
“Joan’s Sherlock” – CBS Elementary (Jonny Lee Miller)
Recipient:
elareineAuthor:
gardnerhillVerse: Elementary; ACD Canon; Granada; Ritchie Films; BBC Sherlock; My Dearly Beloved Detective; Fox & Universal Films.
Characters/Pairings: Holmes & Watson.
Rating:PG-13 (one passage of disturbing medical details)
Warnings: Some particularly graphic medical passages.
Summary: Great minds think alike.
Word Count: 10,090
***
Joan Watson spoke directly to her laptop. “I’m not in the mood for any games tonight. I need direct answers and help.” She used a stern tone and expression to hide her fear. “I know a lot of you are on the cutting edge of technology and science. I’m aware of the theories going around about parallel universes and the like. Maybe some of you even have access to a device or two in that discipline.”
Her email beeped. No sender listed in the pop-up message. AND YOU NEED US TO HELP YOU PULL PEOPLE FROM OTHER WORLDS RATHER THAN GO TO EXPERTS HERE IN THEIR FIELDS, BECAUSE…?
As if they needed to ask. Deductive reasoning was not solely the province of her detective partner. “Everyone” were amoral but not stupid. They didn’t ask why Sherlock hadn’t contacted them first, the usual course of things involving the hacker collective. They’d know it would have something to do with Sherlock’s non-appearance. They just wanted her answer; “Everyone” trafficked in information.
Joan Watson kept her face neutral. Don’t show fear, don’t give away your hand. If you want a favor of a dragon, there is a way to do it. The best way is to play to the dragon’s personality. Think like them. React like them.
She made herself shrug. “I’m testing a theory. Thought it would be fun to do.”
A long pause. Then another incoming email. PONY PRINCESS FANFIC, 1000W. YOUR ACTUAL NAME AS BYLINE.
If only these antisocial creepoids would accept cash payments… “When do you want me to post?” Watson asked.
Beep. PAYMENT BY MIDNIGHT TONITE.
Fortunately this wasn’t the first time “Everyone” had wanted payment involving the inexplicably popular animated series; they kept the entire run of the cartoon available for research at the brownstone. Sherlock had looked rather fetching in a rainbow-coloured mane performing something called the “Muffin Dance” – and since that act had netted them some CCTV footage that helped to halt a squad of human traffickers he considered the loss of dignity a fair trade.
Sherlock. Remember why she was doing this.
“Agreed.”
Joan called up a blank page and began writing.
Beep. NOT TOO MANY ADVERBS. Great, they were reading over her shoulder.
She stopped her mouth from turning up in a grin as she recalled a fond memory of watching a ghastly film with Oren. “Crossovers okay?”
Beep. YES.
She posted “Saddle-Starshine’s Valley Lodge Adventure” at 11:43pm.
Rather to Watson’s secret chagrin her story only got 38 Likes on Fiction Forum; but a day later a messenger left a package on the doorstep of the brownstone. If she’d had any questions about who had provided the strange box that looked something like a tabletop amplifier, the sticker reading “Use Only For Good” over the side-knob left no doubt.
She’d already decided on the number she’d collect. Infinite though parallel universes and alternate universes might be, collecting too many people turned them into a milling, useless mob or brainless army. Best to keep it down to a manageable handful of visitors, 3 or 4 altogether. And she needed more people who thought like her to magnify the brain power in the room, like multiple mirrors in a telescope.
She mentally steeled herself against the shock of running into her own visage changed a number of different ways, took hold of the knob, and turned it clockwise, once. Click.
A Deinonychus roared at her, raising one sickle-clawed hind foot to disembowel her.
Counter-clockwise, click. The dinosaur disappeared.
Joan re-read the instructions and readjusted the gauges, shaking just a little.
Take two.
Quarter-turn around, set. Click.
A white man in a rumpled tweed suit looked up at Joan from the stuffed chair where he’d collapsed. He was mustachioed and his outfit spoke of late-1800s fashion; he wore stockings but no shoes. His eyes were dark and bagged with weariness as he looked around the brownstone’s sitting-room before focusing on the woman in the room. His voice was level and low, with a London accent not unlike Sherlock’s, and clotted with the sound of one who has just come from sleep. “This is a peculiar dream. Why would I picture myself in a Chinese brothel?”
The hell. This couldn’t be right. “Your name?” she said, more sharply than she’d meant.
The man looked taken aback at her approach. But he answered. “Dr. John Watson, madam.”
John was the masculine derivative of Joan. So she was a white English man in this avatar – with the ignorant racism and misogyny of the era those clothes were from. Great.
Fortunately Joan’s reflexes were good. She put down her high-heeled foot immediately, using her operating-room command voice. “Sir, this is your world’s future. Everyone has electric lights, not just wealthy people. Fashions are far less restrictive on women’s clothing now. Further, I am an American citizen, and I am not a prostitute.”
The man’s eyes widened at the fierce flow of words. A flush came to his cheeks and he bowed his head. “Then I beg your forgiveness for my horrific lapse in manners and my frightful assumption regarding your profession, ma’am. I would not be rude to a lady, even in a dream.”
Victorian chivalry. She could work with that. “You are forgiven,” she said, keeping her voice strong. “And I apologize for the shock this must be to you. All will be explained soon.”
The man’s smile was heartbreakingly sad. “A shock like this is preferable to how I usually pass my days.”
Oh, not good. What had happened in her – his – world? Could he be in some version of the time she’d gone through right after Mycroft’s disappearance and Sherlock’s fleeing to MI6? Well, maybe there was something good in his mind that would help.
She reached for the knob again, spun it counterclockwise for a quarter of its circumference, and back. Instead of one click, though, she got a double-click.
Two appeared nearly on each other’s heels. White. Men again. They could have been twins, save that they looked as if they’d been born 15 years apart. One was a hale and hearty man with honey-colored hair, a kind smile and a jaunty trim to his moustache; the other looked older and more careworn around the eyes, missing more hair (and that remaining hair greyer than that of his counterpart), and a little shrunken in stature. Like the first man – who had begun to look around the room with curiosity – they were dressed in Victorian-era garb that, oddly, seemed to match their hair-colors (the younger in pale brown, the elder in gray). They started and stared at each other like a Groucho Marx mirror routine.
One more, she thought. Another woman would be nice this time, universe, someone from this century, maybe this continent too. Counter a full three turns. Halt. Click.
She jumped back as a gaunt young white man whirled around him, bringing up his walking stick and a clenched fist. The others exclaimed and moved out of reach as well. The newcomer braced himself, lurched, and used his stick to straighten again, eyes wide as a trapped raccoon’s.
Fresh from some traumatic experience, Joan deduced instantly. Pivoted like a soldier about-facing – must be a war-vet, and limping badly on one leg, possibly the injury that got him sent home. He was also wearing (shabbier, older) Victorian clothes, and his reactions were those of someone with PTSD. He reeked of beer and unwashed man’s-sweat; probably he’d been yanked from some pre-deodorant tavern. He was younger than all the others, if just as male and just as white; rawboned, face ravaged by recent illness, his clothes and sparse frame denoting poverty. “What the hell am I doing here?” he snapped. English.
“You’re helping me,” Joan said, again as calm as if she was presiding over touchy surgery. She was certainly not calm. Somehow in their worlds, every time, she was a Victorian English white male. What was even up with that?
The man squinted at her. “Is there a Tong war going on in this neighbourhood? Might explain why that madman dragged me out to watch him tonight…”
“Watch your language and show some respect, you feckless pup!” snapped Tweed before Joan could respond. It was the first spark of life she’d seen in him – and judging from the soldier’s startled reaction she wasn’t the only surprised one. “She is not a gangster, nor a demi-mondaine. Apologize to the lady at once!”
After his double-take, the ragged soldier faced Joan and gave a sharp, brief, military head-bow. “Apologies, miss.” A slight hiccup marred his response.
So. Tweed came back to life if there was someone else he could assist.
“All right, all of you,” she said in a command voice, making all of them face her despite the incredulous looks, and taking advantage of their disorientation to establish the upper hand. “I’m very sorry for this intrusion on your lives, but I need some like minds on a subject that I suspect is very near and dear to all of our hearts, because of the nature of our shared identity.”
Skeptical looks from the four Victorian-era white Englishmen facing someone alien to them in three ways – Chinese ancestry, American accent, woman.
She responded by fixing them all with an unwavering stare, longer than proper demure women would have in their time, and it worked; they looked away, uneasy. Only then did she speak again. “My name is Joan. Joan Watson. I was once a doctor.”
Ah. Now she had their attention. To their credit, after their startled looks they stayed silent – no snickering or the like at the thought of a woman of any race taking up their profession.
She continued. “Each one of you is a Doctor Watson as well. I have pulled you into my world where I am the Doctor Watson that you all are in your own worlds.” She waited to give them time to react, even though everything inside her was chanting hurry hurry hurry no time to lose no time –
“I’m definitely asleep,” said the man in tweed.
“I didn’t have that much to drink,” the young soldier muttered.
“By Jove!” the younger of the “twins” cried out, curiosity lighting up his face. “Perhaps that H.G. Wells fellow is on to something!” He once again turned to his counterpart in gray as if staring into a mirror, and realization filled him. “You look like … why you look like my father did when I was a boy! Or like …” One hand rose and unconsciously passed over his head of full brown hair as he looked at the sparser-haired man. “You poor old chap, are you me? Whatever have you seen?”
“Perhaps I should not say,” the older fellow said. His face was more lined and careworn than the younger man, but not as hollow-looking as the first man.
Enough. “Again, I am very sorry to take you from your rightful places, Doctors,” Joan said. “But I called you together because of the one thing we all have in common: Sherlock Holmes.”
And that got their attention again. Soldier rolled his eyes and groaned in agreement. Younger gaped and smiled in wonderment. Elder nodded wearily.
But the man in tweed closed his eyes as if weathering a blow. “Sherlock Holmes is dead,” he said softly, his voice flat and lifeless. “He is dead. I couldn’t recover his body.”
The other Watsons turned toward the solemn man behind them. The two younger men gaped.
Joan pressed her lips together, her heart in her throat. Who knows what slight changes in each world could lead to such an event – and whatever it was she had to make damn sure it didn’t happen here.
The older “twin” had a sad, understanding expression. “Where I am from, Sherlock Holmes was missing and presumed dead for three years,” he said. “I mourned him to the day he returned.” He looked at his incredulous younger self. “Now you know.”
Dead. Missing for three years. So many possibilities in these worlds. Joan clenched her fist rather than reach out to the device and summon another Watson from a place where Holmes was alive and well. “I need your help,” she said, stopping the chain of inquiry, “because in this world where we are – my world – Sherlock Holmes is missing.”
“Holmes?” Soldier shook his head. “He’s not dead nor missing. I’ve barely known the man a month now. I left him breaking heads in the Punch Bowl for our rent money – I’d lost my wound pension to a dice-cup.”
All the Watsons, even the somber Tweed, nodded with expressions that showed their understanding of that last situation. Joan gaped. They all had the same gambling addiction? But she didn’t have any kind of addiction, she helped others break theirs… Well. If you discounted her inability to stay away from dangerous situations and dangerous consulting detectives. All right, maybe she liked the adrenaline. Okay, maybe that actually was a form of gambling. Dammit.
She looked at them all, uneasy and afraid in this futuristic world. “Please stay here, gentlemen, and I’ll come back with tea for everyone first.”
All of them relaxed immediately at the magic word. Joan smiled. If there was one thing four white Englishmen from another century and a Chinese-American woman shared besides a surname, it was the sure knowledge that a cup of tea fixed everything.
Despite her request for them to stay, the younger “twin” in brown followed her to the kitchen, insisting on helping her, and gaped in delight at the refrigerator – did they even have iceboxes in his time yet? “These are also very good for preserving some medicines,” Joan told her alternate self/medical colleague. She forced herself to keep it at that, rather than spill the word about all the current medications for what were dangerous or fatal illnesses in his world – she couldn’t send all the Watsons back with sacks crammed full of penicillin and birth-control pills.
The tea worked its magic (even if the men made comical faces at both the teabags and the thick ceramic mugs rather than the fine porcelain cups they would have used), and all the men seated in the main room of the brownstone faced Joan where she sat in her chair by the fireplace, looking more at ease in this strange new world.
“From the beginning, then,” she said. “Some names and people may be familiar. Some may not.”
Her Sherlock Holmes had left two nights before in the company of Detective Bell (blank looks all around except for Tweed, who recalled a Dr. Joseph Bell in Edinburgh) to talk to a contact among the homeless of the city. (Nods all around at this familiar behavior from Holmes; “I came damn close to being one of those wretches,” Soldier said, and the other Watsons all nodded there too.) They’d headed to a diner for coffee, when one of the homeless women ran up to them and told Sherlock that “Jamie” had sent her. Sherlock had told Detective Bell to go on to the coffee shop and he’d join him soon, and left with the ragged woman. That was the last Bell had seen him, and not one text (“Er, message”) Joan had sent to him was returned.
Jamie, Joan told the assembled Watsons, meant only one thing to Sherlock Holmes: Moriarty.
Tweed’s face contorted in pure anger at the name. Soldier and Younger frowned in puzzlement, the name clearly meaning nothing to them.
Elder looked angry and disbelieving at the same time. “A woman? Possibly Moriarty’s daughter? The man himself is dead, at the site where he tried to kill Holmes and the reason Holmes went into hiding.”
“Dead,” echoed Tweed. “Dead where I am from as well. In a shared grave he does not deserve to hallow.”
Moriarty was a man in their worlds too, what a surprise. And dead in the same worlds with dead/missing Sherlock. A pattern was emerging, as well as a timeline; the two younger ones hadn’t found out about Moriarty yet.
She explained. Moriarty was a woman, yes. Evil, yes again. She had been in prison and had seemed to escape, and had contacts and informants everywhere. And her name on a contact’s lips had caused Sherlock to disappear.
Joan knew she was the one weakness of Moriarty’s, the one thing she could not comprehend in full. Joan also knew the importance of going big as opposed to going home. So if one Watson could neutralize one Moriarty, surely more Watsons would overwhelm that evil genius. Parallel universes or alternate worlds sounded like the kind of thing Everyone would know about, which was why she’d contacted them. “’Everyone’ is what we call our street informants,” she explained at the puzzled looks. "It’s a gang of sorts, of rogue scientists.”
“Charming,” Soldier said. “A flock of Frankensteins.” Joan couldn’t argue with that.
“And this woman Moriarty.” Elder looked at Joan earnestly. “Is she murderous as was the Professor we fled?”
“This Moriarty knows how to murder.” Joan thought of the “gift” Jamie had given her – Elana March, the crime boss who’d attempted to have Watson killed and had murdered her lover instead, found dead in her cell without a mark on her. “Bad things happen to her enemies, and yet so little gets traced back to her.”
“A spider in a web,” Elder agreed. Tweed closed his eyes in pain at that term.
“But there is one line she will not, seemingly cannot cross.” Joan thought of the fascination Jamie Moriarty held for her partner – a fascination nearly identical with the one she herself had. “She will not kill Sherlock Holmes.”
Soldier smirked. “So this she-villain is a real woman after all. She can’t bring herself to kill a man she loves.”
“Women kill their lovers a hundred times a day, child,” Tweed said sharply. "It may also surprise you to learn that women can feel other things toward men besides love or romantic jealousy.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Joan replied – a little bemused that the quietest, saddest man in this Victorian cabal seemed to have a better grasp of women than the others, even if it was occasionally tinged with racism. “You’re right. It’s not romantic love between them. I think it’s fascination with how each other’s minds work, despite their knowing that it’s a dangerous thing to contemplate.”
Soldier’s eyebrow lifted. “Sounds like Holmes, all right.”
Elder nodded. “He does at times seem to miss having the Professor as an opponent that’s his intellectual equal.”
“That attraction can be fatal to both,” Tweed reminded them.
“There’s another connection here, that’s as strong. I don’t know if you two shared it,” Joan addressed Elder and Tweed. “Moriarty in this world seems to have a separate fascination for me. Or obsession. I caught her in a trap she didn’t foresee – she’d underestimated me. She might expect me to follow her, or she did this deliberately to get me to find her, using Sherlock as bait.” Okay, that was a little funny – all four men following along but then looking shocked at her using her partner’s first name.
Elder recovered first. “No. No, the Professor had no interest in me at all. He even sent a messenger to …” he looked at his younger self and stopped. “No. I was a mere impediment.”
“He tricked me into deserting my post,” Tweed said, and said no more; the memory clearly hurt him.
Joan looked at her bizarre tea party, and instead of seeing four Victorian white men she now arranged them chronologically in her mind. Soldier, the newcomer who’d just befriended Sherlock Holmes; Younger, settled in with Sherlock Holmes but still not badly marked by the world; Elder, sadder and wiser and stronger where a temporary loss had marked him; Tweed, buried in grief at his permanent loss. Four versions of herself – a traumatized ex-surgeon seeking only to be useful since she was not happy, settling in to discover a joy in sharing her partner’s work, recovering from the times when she missed this man and this work like a lost limb, uneasy but resolute; and she would not be that last man.
“Doctors,” she said. "When you’ve finished your tea, I’d like you to come to the workroom.”
***
It was a bit crowded in her basement office. They loved the whiteboard she had set up in there, and her laptop and other machines got plenty of wistful looks too, but she stuck with the basic building blocks of the craft of detection.
She took the black marker from where Soldier was sniffing it. “Sherlock Holmes is missing. Moriarty has something to do with it. What can she gain from all this? Any and all ideas are good, no matter how strange.”
She let them talk and began to scribble. “A hostage.” “Ransom.” “Control over you.” “Forced marriage.” “A prisoner to torment.” “Where is the water closet?” (“Indoor toilet over there,” she directed Tweed.) “An experimental subject.” “She needs a spy, and plans to control his mind somehow.” “Is she a mathematics professor? Are women even permitted to be college professors? Might she require an assistant?” “Why are we talking, dammit? Let’s just arrest her now – might be able to thrash a confession out of her or one of her cohorts.” (“That’s not how we do things here,” she told Soldier, and tamped down the nasty part of her mind wholeheartedly agreeing with him.)
The doorbell sounded above. She pulled out her phone and saw the missed message where Bell said he was coming over with takeout. “Marcus,” Joan said out loud. And looked at her squad, who’d also noted the bell. “I’ll go get Detective Bell.”
“Isn’t that for the housekeeper to do?” Tweed asked, and the others nodded.
"It’s her day off.” Oh this was going to be such fun, unless she nipped it in the bud. “Gentlemen, before we proceed any further in meeting a new person, listen to me. Detective Marcus Bell is a colleague of both Sherlock Holmes and myself, and a dear friend as well. He is Afri- He is black.” Joan smiled sweetly at her bevy of Watsons. “And if one of you says a single thing to him about his race – even if you think it’s a compliment – I’ll rip off all your mustaches.”
Four white men became even whiter. Oh yes. That fear and recognition on their faces meant that they knew and believed she was a Watson too – and she’d do exactly that.
“He is a police detective. That’s all you need to concern yourselves about. Do not touch anything until I return.” She went upstairs and got the door. “Marcus, please come in.”
“Joan, hey.” Bell hefted a bagged cardboard box with a smile; it wafted the mouth-watering pastry-meat smell of empanadas. “How you holding up?”
“About as well as you’d expect. Trying a new approach to the problem,” she replied truthfully.
“So I see,” Bell said, looking over her shoulder with his best deadpan expression.
Joan turned around to see all four men at the top of the stairs. “Didn’t feel right, a lady having a gentleman over without a chaperone,” Tweed rumbled and the others echoed.
“Good evening, Detective Bell,” Younger said with a wide grin, stepping forward and extending his hand.
"It was afternoon when I came here,” Soldier said.
“Mid-morning for me,” Elder added.
"It was night-time. I was asleep,” Tweed finished, indicating his rumpled clothes and stocking feet. “I haven’t been sleeping well for some time.”
Joan turned back to Bell.
“I’m guessing this has nothing to do with jet lag,” was all he said, looking at the four mustachioed white men. “Always something going on in New York.”
“New York? Are we in America?” Younger exclaimed delightedly. The others clamored in similar fashion.
Joan facepalmed. Oh, right. Details. She lifted her head to face Det. Bell’s narrow-eyed gaze, and smiled. “Marcus. Do you think you’re ready for a whole new level of weirdness involving Sherlock and me?”
Marcus Bell looked once more at what appeared to be a barbershop quartet in mustaches and quaint suits, and back at Joan. "Is a Delorean involved in any of this?”
“Or Rufus’ phone booth,” Joan conceded. “Something like that.”
To his credit, Marcus Bell took that information in stride. He faced the men, face stern. “Just tell me you guys aren’t slaveowners.”
“Perish the thought, young man!” Tweed said indignantly, and the others agreed in chorus. “My parents proudly supported the Northern Unionists in that righteous war!”
Marcus’ face was expressionless. “…Thanks.”
Amused despite herself, Joan turned to her bevy of Watsons and saw them surreptitiously inhaling as the delicious pastries made their presence known. “Let’s all sit at the kitchen table and have something to eat.” Even she was hungry now.
“Oh, you must see the refrigerator!” Younger told the other Watsons.
An impromptu tour of a modern kitchen segued into an introduction to empanadas (Bell had fortunately brought a full dozen, enough for everybody including himself).
“I brought in this group because they think a certain way that may help me focus on where Sherlock went,” Joan explained.
“Frankly, anything would help right now,” Bell conceded. “No footprints, fingerprints, blood traces, DNA – it’s like Sherlock vanished into thin air.”
Joan held still. The four men she’d conjured out of thin air were still eating (and exchanging stories of meals in India and Afghanistan). What, exactly, did the situation look like from where she’d taken them? Were they, too, missed and searched for as she hunted for Sherlock?
Was it even the same Moriarty Joan knew who’d targeted Sherlock, or was it one from their world – one where Moriarty was a man and called Professor? Except there was the problem of technology, and nanodevices were definitely not possible with Victorian machinery.
So. Improbable, but with impossibilities eliminated, that meant that Jamie Moriarty very likely had access to this type of device too.
And if it could pull something or someone from another time or another world…could it also serve as a teleport, pulling someone from that person’s same world, working sideways rather than straight forward? She hadn’t noticed that in her reading of the instructions.
And if she had such a device to do this…was Jamie Moriarty also doing what Joan had just done? For a moment of panic Joan thought about Jamie summoning other Moriartys to pool their geniuses and resources to some horrific end – but in the next moment dismissed that completely. If she’d learned nothing else from current events, it was that venal sociopaths did not work well together – they were so greedy and selfish that they turned on each other in a heartbeat like sharks devouring an injured shark during a feeding frenzy. Jamie was not only intelligent but self-aware; she’d know herself to be of that nature, and very likely avoid it altogether.
But – what about the other Sherlocks? And could she be collecting them? More people to use for some horrific undertaking of hers?
If another device was involved, that meant…
Excusing herself from the table for a minute (and unable to prevent all the Watsons from rising as a woman stood to leave them, to Marcus’ bemusement), Joan headed back down to fetch her laptop.
More future shock for the Watson quartet, as Joan powered up the machine; “Give it another hundred years, guys,” Bell said to the barrage of questions. "It’s all math, it all boils down to math – ones and zeroes. Look, talk to Ada Lovelace when you get back.”
Joan attached Moriarty’s mug shot and priors via email to her contact. “Do you track who has these devices?” she sent.
OF COURSE, replied Everyone. SHE ISN’T IN OUR DATABASE.
“Check her list of associates and known contacts in that file.”
A longer pause. SOME OF US REALLY LIKED THAT STORY OF YOURS. DO A SEQUEL? 2000W.
And it was really wrong of Joan to think two things nearly at the same time – 1) They have information that will help me track her down and find Sherlock, and 2) They liked it they liked it!
“These mincemeat pasties are superb,” Soldier said and the others agreed (Tweed had actually finished one). “I didn’t know Americans could cook anything besides turkey.”
“Immigration helps,” Bell said. “Joan, any luck?”
“I think I may have a lead soon, Marcus,” Joan called over her shoulder from where she stood at the kitchen counter with her laptop, fingers flying. “Quick question. If you were a talking pony, how would you fend off a vampire?”
Bell and all the other Watsons looked at each other. “The poor girl has brain-fever,” Tweed said.
“That’s not even a thing,” Bell said, “and I think you’re right.”
***
Cars, telephones, and underground public transportation were part of everyday life for all the Watsons. However, they were not prepared for the small size and portability of the telephones, the speed of the vehicles, and the sheer volume and variety of humanity on an NYC subway. “This underground train smells better than the London one,” Tweed said to everyone’s agreement; Joan didn’t want to think of what that said about 1880s-era transport. The four men in Victorian clothes (Tweed wearing a borrowed pair of Sherlock’s shoes) blended right in with the drag queens, street performers, turbaned Sikhs, pierced and tattooed skateboarders, women in hijabi, people with Midwestern accents wearing shirts and hats displaying NYC points of interest, and Hasidic scholars in black.
From the station it was a short walk to the strip-mall that was their target – enough for the Watsons to gape like any other tourists at the tall buildings around them, even in this off-Manhattan neighborhood.
A thin white man in his 40s was closing a shop called Batteries and Bulbs when he found himself surrounded by five Watsons. “George Vasarnian,” Joan said to the thin man. “I’d like to talk to you about a device you obtained from the Internet for your main employer – the one responsible for the paychecks that get deposited in the Cayman Islands.”
Vasarnian looked at the anachronisms around his shop counter. “I don’t –“
“The mechanism that you handed off to Jamie Moriarty,” Tweed said in a voice of iron. “The one she has been using to steal others from their rightful places for no good purpose. Tell us.” His voice rang like a general’s, and Vasarnian practically snapped to attention. Joan bit back a frustrated sigh; even in this modern time, a man’s voice was more readily listened to and obeyed than a woman’s. She tried to accept Tweed’s assistance as helpful for both of them.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” George sneered. “Now get out of my face or I’ll have you arrested.”
“NYPD,” Bell said, producing his ID. “Maybe you should answer the questions they’re posing.”
A long pause. “Look, I’m just a go-between.”
“A poor excuse,” snapped Younger indignantly. “You knew she’d misuse the device.”
“For twenty mil I don’t give a rat’s ass what she does with it,” Vasarnian snapped back.
“Twenty million.” Soldier blinked. “That’s 4 million pounds sterling. There are lords that aren’t that rich.”
“I suppose this shopkeeping is to help you make ends meet,” Elder said snidely.
“A front for one of her money-laundering sites,” Joan said, nodding. “Very low-key. Let me know where she is.” Her own voice borrowed the steel from Tweed’s tone.
“You can’t do anything to me.” Vasarnian’s face changed as the hand in his pocket moved around, groping in vain.
Joan smiled at him and held up his phone. “Looking for this? You were going to signal her.”
“Oh, well done!” Younger said delightedly. Soldier lifted an eyebrow and tapped his lips with a forefinger, clearly pondering the benefits of learning such a skill.
“Again,” Joan said, and made her voice steel. “Where is she.”
Vasarnian smirked at her. “Let’s see. Horrors unimaginable if I talk, or absolutely nothing at all if I don’t. Decisions, decisions. You can put me in a cell for a day or two but you got nothing on me. Now either shit or get off the pot, it’s dinnertime and I’m hungry.”
Elder seized Soldier’s wrist just as he lifted his stick and quelled him with a firm grip and a stern look into lowering his weapon. “Horrors unimaginable, you say?” he began, turning to the man with a pleasant smile. “We don’t need to imagine them. Tell me, Mr. Vasarnian. How much do you know of combat surgery?”
All the other Watsons smiled – Joan included. Especially when she saw the flicker of something like fear in the man’s eyes.
"There are things you’ll never forget,” Elder continued. “Such as stuffing a screaming man’s guts back into his belly while trying to sew it shut at the same time.”
Vasarnian went white.
“Blood and bile and pus everywhere,” Joan added.
“Pulling out a tattered piece of meat that used to be a stomach, still attached to a living man,” Younger said, eyes distant.
Vasarnian went green.
“Getting three other men to hold him down so you can saw off his arm while he’s pissing and shitting himself for pain and cursing you,” Soldier said.
“And that’s completely leaving out the explosions and artillery flying around you,” Tweed reminded him.
“Fountain of blood hitting you in the face,” Joan chimed in.
“Finding a man’s body in an empty building when he’s been dead for three days in 100-degree weather,” added Detective Bell, who clearly had plenty of his own type of war stories. “When it’s more like a man-shaped pile of maggots.”
Vasarnian went mottled – red, white, bilious.
“Finding an entire village full of man-shaped maggot piles,” Soldier put in. “You never forget that smell, no matter how much you drink.” He and Marcus exchanged a look and a nod.
“We can do this all day,” Joan said.
“We have lots of stories we never write down,” Younger added.
"It’s a damn bloody relief to talk about it, too,” Soldier said, grinning.
“You won’t be able to eat meat for a year by the time we’re done talking,” Tweed said cheerily.
“We haven’t even started talking about the infections,” said Joan. “You won’t want to eat anything at all for a week.”
“Then there’s the diseases,” Elder reminded them, and cleared his throat as if to deliver a lecture to a hall full of students. “The first symptom of trenchfoot is–“
Vasarnian talked – practically gave them Moriarty’s GPS coordinates. Bell called in a black-and-white to get him booked in solitary for protection. And no need to feed the prisoner, no.
“Nicely done, everyone,” Joan said as they watched the squad car drive off.
“Apologies for the language, miss,” Soldier said, blushing.
Detective Bell smirked.
“I was a doctor too – I’ve been up to my elbows in human effluvia, even if I haven’t seen the horrors of a war zone,” Joan reminded Soldier. There was a touch of sweetness hiding in that gaunt young man. A pity; if he was better fed and healthier he’d be drop-dead gorgeous… Focus, Joan, focus. She brought up her own phone with the information Vasarnian had spilled and called up a map. “So she’s hiding out in France. And she definitely has a device like the one I used to disrupt your lives.”
“Please don’t feel bad about that, ma’am,” Tweed said. “This ‘disruption’ is the best diversion I’ve had in over a year.” He gazed in envy and wonder at the small rectangle in Joan’s hand. “A library’s worth of reading material, maps of the whole world, automatic calculations, a clock, education from every nation, instantaneous communication – what an age to live in, where such a thing fits in one’s pocket!”
Joan smiled. “Unfortunately, my fellow Watson, human nature has not changed one bit since your time. What do you think is the single greatest use of this item in the world?”
Soldier shook his head with his own rueful grin. “Pornography,” he replied.
Detective Bell and Joan nodded at him.
“Disgraceful,” Younger snapped, blushing; Elder nodded firmly, sans blush.
Joan hefted her phone. “Just as the device I used to call you in to help me could likely summon the greatest thinkers of the world to pool their resources across time, but Moriarty used it to snatch away…”
Snatch away. Or lock away.
“Miss?” Younger said.
“Joan?” Bell asked. “You were saying?”
Joan Watson looked at Tweed – Dr. Watson – hollow-eyed with grief after his Sherlock Holmes had confronted their Moriarty (score: both dead). Younger and Elder – Dr. Watson, one individual from one world but from two different dates – who’d gone from jovial youth to grey sorrow after a different Moriarty and their Sherlock Holmes had clashed (score: Moriarty dead, Holmes driven into hiding for years avoiding retaliation). And there was Soldier – Dr Watson, recently discharged from wartime service – just beginning his friendship with his Holmes and as unaware of Moriarty as was Younger.
In each case, over and over, Moriarty drawn to Holmes and as unable to resist that attraction as Watson. Drawn by hate, fascination, grudging admiration for another powerful intellect, desire to bend that will and that brain to their own self-regarding ends – in Jamie’s case wanting to keep him around to play with, puzzle with, match wits, defeat, reflect her own genius back to her.
Joan’s squad provided examples of two worlds where Moriarty was driven to kill Holmes, or to make the attempt. But here and now was a Moriarty who could not and would not kill either Holmes or Watson.
Maybe, in her own twisted way, Jamie Moriarty was collecting Sherlock Holmeses to keep them safe from their Moriartys – and had probably snatched Sherlock just because she could, or as a practice of the device. He would be the crown jewel of her bizarre zoo.
…And if the device could pull sideways…could it also push sideways?
“Joan?” Bell said. “You’re grinning about something.”
“You were saying something, Miss Watson,” Elder prompted her.
For just a split-second Joan hesitated, unsure if she should ask them –
Idiot. They’re YOU.
She looked the others in the eyes. “Watsons,” she said. “Do you mind taking another unnatural trip? I’m planning an assault on Moriarty’s stronghold. I think I know how to find where she’s holding Sherlock Holmes captive.”
“I’m with you,” Tweed said first, and the others chorused affirmative.
Joan beamed at Det. Bell. “Care to go to France tomorrow, Marcus?”
“In the DeLorean?” A second later the automatic denial left his expression. “Do you need me along for backup?”
“No, we’ll be fine,” she said. “But thank you for the offer. We may need you at home, holding the other end of the clothesline. Back to the brownstone.”
***
Bell promised to return the next morning.
Dinner was Italian takeout, much to the delight of the other Watsons. They also all loved the shower.
Between the sofa, the guest room, and Sherlock’s bed there was enough space for everyone to sleep, and Sherlock’s eclectic wardrobe provided sleepwear for everyone. They all dropped off rapidly, even Tweed now that he had a purpose – soldiers clearly learned early to snatch sleep whenever it was available.
Joan took the instructions to bed and re-read them – and in the fine print and only in German was the heading “Seitwärtsfahrt” (“sideways travel”), with the instructions.
Next morning she was up early and jogging in place to settle her nerves. She dressed in a comfortable top-skirt combination with sturdy heeled boots. Her guests were up and packing food and other supplies for the trip – everything was wonderful to them, including the sliced bread.
When Bell showed up, Joan gave him the rundown on the basics of working the device. She plugged in the locale from her phone, and the internal clicking as the device began to recalibrate sent butterflies to her stomach. She was really going to do this.
“Watson, where do you keep your revolver?” Tweed asked her.
“I don’t have one,” Joan replied.
“Is there any place in America where we might obtain firearms?”
Joan and Bell looked at each other. Joan shook her head. “This will be the element of surprise,” Joan went on, “and we’ve got some non-projectile weapons we can bring.”
“I’m armed.” Soldier pulled apart his walking-stick to reveal a sword.
"Good,” Joan said. “Also, before we start our trip…”
By the time the last Watson had finished in the bathroom, Joan and Marcus had collected two singlesticks, two collapsible batons, and a Taser that she kept for herself. The ease with which the male Watsons took up the weapons and hefted them spoke of their Army backgrounds. Tweed, especially, looked like a thunderstorm and he gripped the singlestick as if it were a cutlass.
Ping. The device was done. She took her phone back. “We’ll call when we’re ready to come back,” she told Bell. “Everybody going, stay together right there.” She set the timer on the device and walked over to the spot she’d marked with duct tape.
Soldier grinned savagely. “The game’s afoot: Follow your spirit, and on this charge –“
“We’re here,” Joan interrupted. They were standing in the middle of a field of lavender. The midday summer sun of south France blazed down on them. “Holy crap, it actually worked.”
“This doesn’t look like a criminal’s lair,” Younger said, looking around at the pale purple flowers.
Joan looked at her phone, and changed position. “Northwest, approximately half a mile. We walk.”
It was a lovely day for a stroll in the warm sun amid the fragrant blooms. What at first looked like a break in the field turned out to be a small dirt road. “This is the strangest battlefield charge I’ve ever done,” Soldier said, looking up at a passing butterfly.
But at the sight of a large walled estate coming into view minutes into their walk, the sole building in the locale, the male Watsons all started moving in an unconscious march. Joan, at their head, settled for the head-high stride that carried a small-statured Chinese-American woman fearlessly through the cat-calling streets of NYC. Her heart beat like a drum. I’m nearly there, Sherlock – and I know you’re trusting me to find you. Brains were better than brawn, but just at the moment she wished she could have a quick meeting between her baton and Moriarty’s skull. “If someone starts shooting, get into the fields,” she said.
Except that…no one shot at them. No one stood guard at the closed wrought-iron gate, nor along the wall. A quick look with the binoculars she’d brought showed no sign of human beings around the perimeter of the splendid house – which otherwise looked custom-made for Moriarty’s liking.
“I don’t like this,” Elder said. Joan nodded, pulling out her lockpicks – the hard plastic ones – and, donning gloves, began to work on the gate lock. There were several possibilities and no good ones came to mind. The gate clicked and she pushed it open with one gloved hand. “Be careful not to touch the metal gates,” she said, and led them in.
The emptiness of the grounds – no vehicles near the garage, a large flat marked pad clearly meant for a helicopter that was nowhere in sight – suggested desertion. A goose chase from that smirking money-launderer? She swallowed her panic. They’d do a search of the house, and only then –
The house door swung open. Joan sucked in a breath made of adrenaline and gripped her Taser, ready to run forward with a yell of rage.
“Watson!” a voice called. And a figure stood in the doorway – a rumpled, tattooed, familiar figure. “Tell your army of dopplegangers to stand down!”
And she did run anyway, whooping – followed by a cheer from the men running behind her.
It was Sherlock. Her Sherlock. And he wasn’t alone. Three other men and a woman stood with him in the courtyard, in clothing old and modern – Victorian dress and bustle, grey dressing-gown, lederhosen, long black coat – that bore the same rumpled, unwashed look to them as his own T-shirt and jeans. But there was no mistaking the intelligent piercing eyes of master deducers in all of them.
She heard a gasp behind her, from Tweed. Then a thud. The other Watsons stopped.
The Sherlock Holmeses moved forward toward the Watsons – and what would have been an extremely emotional reunion between Joan and Sherlock was diverted toward the collapsed man in their midst, and the tall blond hawk-nosed Sherlock Holmes in lederhosen bending over him. “Watson?” he called softly, patting the unconscious Tweed on the cheek. “Watson.”
Elder glared down at the tableaux. “Sigerson the Norwegian explorer, I presume.”
The blond Holmes jerked his head up and stared at Elder, right next to an equally glaring Younger.
“Let’s get him inside and resting until he comes to,” Joan said, taking over and smoothly diverting attention toward taking care of the fallen man. “You three.” And she saw how Elder elbowed aside the blond Holmes to take his place to lift Tweed and carry him into the empty house, forcing the latter to trail behind the impromptu litterbearers. She and her Sherlock stood shoulder to shoulder, watching everyone else go in.
Almost everyone. The female Sherlock Holmes stood with them and said something in Russian, with a tone of disdain.
“You said it, sister,” Joan replied, not knowing in the slightest what she’d just said. “Let’s hear it, Sherlock.”
“Inside,” he said, and repeated it in Russian for the benefit of the other Holmes.
***
They got Tweed lying on what looked like a sofa stolen from Versailles. Joan confirmed that it was indeed just unconsciousness and shock and not a heart attack or aneurism that had felled the poor man; he was already stirring awake. “Water,” Joan said firmly to all the Victorians before they could go get brandy. “Water only.” The blond Holmes insisted on tending the man himself; the others left the pair a little privacy for their reunion and convened in a magnificent dining-room nearby.
All sat at the bare table in the elegant room and made things clear. Yes, it was Moriarty, the Holmeses confirmed – the Russian practically spitting the name – the female Moriarty Joan and her Sherlock knew and whom Sherlock had also known by her artist alias of Irene Adler. Jamie Moriarty. This was apparently one of her boltholes all over the world.
Yes, she had dragged them all away and penned them in this house, via the strange little box. “This Moriarty woman had planned to use us against each other, I believe,” the hawk-nosed fellow in the gray dressing gown said calmly. “And failing that, to hold our Watsons’ fates as a bargaining chip. All to attempt to make at least a few of us join her syndicate.”
“She is extremely intelligent,” Sherlock said. “But a sociopath at the core.” (He then translated for the Russian, even as Elder muttered that ’villain’ covered that idea without all this Freud talk.)
Joan nodded. “A sociopath will do anything for self – lie, cheat, steal, kill – and simply doesn’t understand the concept of honor or courage. She didn’t or couldn’t realize that no amount of money, power or fame would turn Sherlock Holmes in any time or place to aiding and abetting evil.”
“Not even fear for Watson's life,” said the dressing-gowned Sherlock Holmes. “I know that my friend would rather die than see me turn against everything I’ve ever believed in. And I’d rather die than lose his belief in me.” He said it in the same calm way he’d recite a scientific formula.
The unpaired Watsons and Holmeses at the table all nodded in agreement.
From the next room, quiet tender words became Tweed’s angry raised voice and “Sigerson’s” pleading tone. Elder smiled grimly at the sound. Joan was a little amused, but mostly relieved that Sherlock Holmes hadn’t really been dead in Tweed’s world either. “They’ll work it out,” Elder said, and the longcoated Holmes nodded. "It won’t be easy, but they’ll become stronger.”
Then Elder looked sad again. “And I have proof that Sherlock Holmes would rather be dead to the world than have his Watson endangered due to his work, also.” The longcoated Sherlock Holmes bowed his head, nodding over his tight-laced fingers.
“Which doesn’t explain why there’s no Moriarty here,” said Joan. “Nor why there aren’t about a hundred more Sherlock Holmeses running around this place, if she had that device.”
“Once I’d ascertained the cause of our peculiar situation,” her Sherlock said, “something Everyone has been postulating about for some time now, I communicated to my fellows via wall-taps that we were all essentially the same person and we needed to force her hand, that her threats against Watson were pure bluff as she could not bring herself to harm you. After that it became child’s play to organize a break out of our different cells, subdue her guards, and destroy the device.”
“Sherlock!” Joan shouted. “She won’t touch ME, but she could have easily killed the other Watsons without batting an eye!”
The other Holmeses looked horrified. The Watsons shrugged.
"It worked,” her Holmes said simply. “And in acting as we did, we proved we were not only ungovernable, but unstoppable. Her inability to kill me forced her hand too – she fled, as she often does when one of her plans falls through. By now she’s far from here and lying low. And she has no device. Unlike us.” With a nod, he acknowledged the army of Watsons.
“So we have been here, sans this Moriarty, for 2 days,” confirmed Longcoat.
The Russian Holmes angrily spoke and Sherlock translated. “She also left us with no food, electricity nor means of communication for that same time. We were just short of drawing straws to see who’d get eaten first when we saw you.”
“Good God!” exclaimed Younger, and immediately hoisted his knapsack on the table. “Why didn’t you say so earlier – er, Holmes? We made sandwiches.” The other Watsons followed suit.
So this gorgeous estate had essentially been an unlocked prison in the middle of nowhere for the Holmeses, even with no Moriarty to hold them; Joan felt a good deal less ridiculous about her war party.
Realizing that not only “Sigerson” but the grieving Tweed had not eaten much recently (Tweed had finished only one of the empanadas and had picked at his ravioli), she left the genteel feeding frenzy and took her knapsack to the living room, tapping on the door to announce herself. Both men were now sitting side by side on the divan, stiff and angry and uncomfortable in a pained silence. “Eat something,” she said, putting her sandwiches on the side-table, and left them to rejoin the others in the dining room. All the Victorian males stood when she took her seat; the Russian woman, Longcoat and her Sherlock kept eating.
“Yes, we do have the same sort of device back at the brownstone,” Joan confirmed when she sat back down. “I also have my phone, so once I call Detective Bell he can recall us, and we can return everyone to their proper places and times.”
Her Sherlock nodded. “I told everyone you would find us, Watson.”
“Not trying to find you was not an option,” she responded in the same tone.
Elder nodded firmly, and looked at his younger self. “To hell with worrying about my existence if things change. Listen, younger me. When you get that note at Reichenbach, and don’t find his body? Don’t go home mourning him. Go to Florence and meet him there, and together you can perhaps avoid this grief and pain.” Longcoat nodded firmly.
Younger looked bewildered, but nodded. Then smiled a little. “I just might save you from losing that hair.”
Hawknose and Longcoat burst out laughing – as did the Russian after Sherlock had translated. “Good old Watson!” Hawknose said.
Joan smiled, moved at this proof that possibly one timeline would avoid the heartache being roughly mended in the next room. “Once we’re finished eating we’ll go home. Gather whatever you need. I’ll get the other two. Where is the device, by the way?”
Sherlock showed her the remains, which now just looked like a pile of plastic shards and snapped circuit boards; Joan scooped them into her knapsack before going into the next room.
Tweed and Sigerson were still sitting in silence, but now they both looked quiet and sad. But the haunted look was gone from Tweed’s face, and he looked better already even angry as he was. There was also not a crumb left of either sandwich. Both looked up when Joan came in and arose to follow her without a word.
“Unfortunately I can’t send you both home together,” she said. “You’ll have to go back to exactly where you both were when you were grabbed. But at least you know the truth.”
“And I can lie on paper easily enough, Holmes,” Tweed said icily. “I am a fiction writer, after all. I will mourn you extensively in my story about Reichenbach, and keep my knowledge that you live to myself.”
His disguised Holmes nodded. “You may…go to my brother’s club to obtain updates on my progress. Tell him that Sigerson sent you, and he will let you know anything you like.”
Tweed jerked his head in a nod of his own.
Once all were gathered together, Joan sent a text. Five minutes later the estate was deserted.
Two minutes after that Detective Bell was on the phone ordering several large pizzas to handle the sudden crowd in the brownstone.
***
Sending back the Watsons was easy – Joan simply reversed the same moves she’d used to obtain them – and they vanished one by one. All of them made their farewells to Joan, and in Soldier’s case he snapped off a salute to his temporary commander; she wasn’t sure of military protocol, so she nodded acknowledgement before sending him back to the Punch Bowl’s fighting pit. Tweed and Sigerson kept their eyes on each other till they were parted.
Carefully calibrating the places and times for the Holmeses took longer, and Joan took her time, remembering the dinosaur. This gave all of the former captives a much-needed respite in which to make up for 2 days of hunger, lost sleep, unheated showers and grimy clothes. The Victorians loved the washing machine and were quite angry that they couldn’t bring it back with them, especially the Russian (“This would save women weeks of work every year! Weeks!”).
THANKS FOR THE UPDATE, Everyone replied to Joan’s filling them in on the loss of Moriarty’s device. WE’VE GOT HER CONTACTS ON THE NO-BUY LIST FROM NOW ON. WHEN YOU’RE DONE, BOX UP THE THING AND LEAVE IT ON YOUR DOORSTEP ALONG WITH THE REST OF THE OTHER ONE, WE’LL TAKE CARE OF IT FROM THERE. ANY CHANCE OF A SEQUEL TO YOUR STORY? Joan shut down her laptop.
As Joan and Sherlock calculated every place on the dial to send the Holmeses back, their visitors took their leave one by one. The blond Sherlock Holmes who had been taken from halfway up the Matterhorn was the last to go.
“The one piece of advice I can give my other self,” Sherlock said to the man, “is to keep the lines of communication open.”
“If it involves Watson,” said Joan Watson, “then talk to Watson. Keep yourself safe, and go home to him when you can.”
He nodded. “That, I have finally deduced for myself. I appreciate the reinforcement. Best wishes in this brave new world.” And he was gone.
Joan exhaled. “Sherlock, we owe Marcus a dinner for him and a date at Per Se.”
“Agreed.”
She looked at him and smiled a little. "You once said that there is room in the world for only one Holmes and only one Watson. It’s kind of nice to know we’re not the most dysfunctional version of that pairing.”
He merely lifted one eyebrow. “I would still like to know where that one Sherlock Holmes found that coat.”
The next day, when Joan brought the repackaged device outside to leave on the stoop for Everyone’s pickup, a manila envelope lay on the step; the scrawl “To my dearest Joan Watson” in a familiar hand on the front drove the breath from her lungs. But she picked it up and took it inside, shouting for her partner.
A note with no prints, plain paper. Joan swallowed her apprehension and felt the cool armor enclose her that she needed to mentally wear whenever she dealt with this woman. They read the note together (Joan wearing the gloves she’d used to pick the lock at a possibly electrified gate).
By now, my dear Joan, you must have retrieved Sherlock Holmes and all the avatars I hosted. Not all one’s projects can end in success, I’m afraid – and underestimating an opponent such as yourself or even Sherlock can be a fatal flaw which I must work to remove. In my defense I will only say that human capital is a tricky asset to manage, and that one can occasionally have too much of a good thing. I’ll have better luck next time. Maybe I’ll even impress you at last.
Yours,
Jamie Moriarty
“In your dreams, you twisted –” Joan muttered out loud to the note, and Sherlock hid a smile as his partner handed the note off to him with two fingers, not looking at it a second time. “Here. We need kindling.”
“As you wish.” Sherlock headed off to do her bidding. “Congratulations on that work in replacing everyone – if you did your work correctly, all the displaced from other timelines will find no change at all in their status.”
“Maybe a hiccup here and there,” Joan said. “But I think I got them all sorted.”
***
“Where’d you go, old boy?” Holmes was bloody and filthy and covered with sweat – and grinning as he clutched a fistful of notes. “Lost you for a moment in the crowd.”
“Must have tripped over someone,” Watson said. “Is there enough there to go to Marcini’s? I’d love some Italian.”
***
Watson still dozed before the fire, fingers laced over his belly. Holmes smiled and picked up the newspaper he’d dropped.
***
Holmes still dozed before the fire, violin and bow slipping from his fingers. Watson walked over to rescue the instrument.
***
“Did you say something, Shirley?” Jane Watson queried, her back to her employer’s desk.
“No, nothing at all,” Holmes said, and resettled her chair, smiling.
***
“Next time you sulk in your bloody room for three days, tell me!” John shouted when Sherlock walked out of his bedroom, and Sherlock grinned.
***
He awoke from the deepest sleep he’d enjoyed in over a year and stretched in fragile bliss.
What a bizarre dream he’d had – copies of himself and Holmes, from the future and even from America, and one was a Chinese woman, and Sherlock Holmes not dead but only in exile hunting down Moriarty’s gang, and Moriarty a woman keeping everyone a prisoner in France. And being angry with Holmes who was blond and dressed as a Norwegian, and eating sandwiches in that French house, and Holmes telling him to talk to Mycroft.
Dream only, of course. Sherlock Holmes was dead and his body lost forever to the Reichenbach cauldron, forced to share a grave with the criminal he’d hunted. He’d probably dreamed of strange foreign food because he couldn’t remember the last full meal he’d eaten.
He sat up on the sofa where he’d lain down to rest.
Something crinkled in his pocket. He reached a hand in and pulled out a crumpled piece of waxed paper containing bread crumbs and the lingering smell of a ham sandwich.
He was still for a full minute, eliminating the impossible and accepting the improbable.
Then Dr. John Watson rose to wash and change his clothing. He had a visit to make to the Diogenes Club, and he planned to ask its founder about Sigerson.
THE END
DRAMATIS WATSONAE:
Tweed – Canon Watson (as portrayed by ACD and Sidney Paget)
Younger – Granada Watson, Seasons 1-2 (David Burke)
Elder – Granada Watson, Seasons 3 – on (Edward Hardwicke)
Soldier – Guy Ritchie films (Jude Law)
Joan – CBS Elementary (Lucy Liu)
DRAMATIS HOLMESAE:
“Sigerson” – Canon Holmes (ACD, Sidney Paget)
Hawknose – 20th-Century Fox & Universal Films (Basil Rathbone)
Longcoat – BBC Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch)
Russian – My Dearly Beloved Detective (Yekaterina Vasilyevna)
“Joan’s Sherlock” – CBS Elementary (Jonny Lee Miller)
no subject
Date: 2017-12-30 08:41 am (UTC)I deliberately chose Joan Watson as the core of the story to make a change from the default white-male POV in most SH stories; it also let me have her view all the Victorian avatars as some sort of bizarre mutation of herself, rather than seeing Joan Watson as an odd variation on the "normal" white male Victorian Watson.
And if there's one thing a modern-day Chinese-American woman and a white Victorian Englishman agree on, it has to be tea!