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holmestice2021-06-12 04:10 pm
holmesticemods) wrote in holmestice2021-06-12 04:10 pm
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Fic for fridaythegowerstreetcat: To Sleep, Perchance
Title: To Sleep, Perchance
Recipient:fridaythegowerstreetcat
Author: Marta
Verse: Doyle
Characters/Pairings: Holmes/Watson, Mycroft Holmes and Mrs. Hudson offscreen
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Violent themes and imagery. Original character deaths, primarily offscreen. Sexual exploitation as a theme. Frankly excessive use of mythology and of Latin. Canon-typical racism
Summary: “This, Watson, is my confession. Confiteor Deo omnipotenti: quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opera: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Now I must lie abed while my leg heals and see those same children run about day after day. God grant me the strength.”
During the Great Hiatus, Holmes has cause to reflect.
~*~*~*~*~*~
August 14, 1893.
Well past midday
Last night I dreamt of Maiwand. Of the desert sand and the blinding sun and the glimmering bullet passing through my shoulder, and leaving only blood and pus and above all pain in its wake. It is your shoulder, of course, but in my dreamscape it feels so much like mine. I hope you would not begrudge me this use of your crucible; I have my own, I know, but I grow weary of the dank, chilled rocks under the Reichenbach Falls. Sometimes I long for a bit of warmth.
The dream is an old friend: not constant companion, perhaps, but familiar enough I truly should not still be caught so off-guard by those particular phantasms. Somehow, I still am. Most nights I would shake myself awake, gulp down a cup of cool water, brace myself at the window-sill until the night’s breeze could pull me back to the waking-world. But last night there was no water to be had, and when I tried to pull myself to my feet, I howled at the pain that shot through my broken leg. Just as well; I had slept under the open air, and even if I had a window-sill there would certainly be no cooling breezes in these tropical lands.
By Jove, though! What I would give for a gulp of water, cool or hot; or a steadying hand at my shoulder.
~*~*~*~*~*~
August 18, 1893
Early evening; some two hours past the sun’s setting with the first stars newly visible
Watson-
I find myself once more in a civilized estate, with a bed and a pillow and a yam porridge and no small quantity of tea making their way through my stomach and intestines, so I will address you again in the civilized way. Watson. I do like the sound of your name, if only in my mind.
It has been a year and more since we last parted company in Switzerland. There; that is a polite enough way to put it, if I am to play again at refinement? Though of course I desire no such thing. My present hosts offer what comforts they can, but my head aches and my leg aches and my very pulse seems to throb under my skin; and as for conversation and reflection, just now the present reality both begs not to be examined too closely and yet somehow demands it.
You were a soldier, and one left injured far from home; perhaps you would understand.
Or perhaps I only desire your attention, your kind eyes and your knowing smile and the flutter of your breath, rich with brandy, against the back of my neck, as you leaned over my chair to point out some story in the day’s papers, back in our shared rooms in Baker Street. (On that last point, there is no ‘perhaps.’) I should tell you how I came to be here; that is after all the whole point of my constructing this account – but just now I am quite hung up on a single thought. My paper is thick, so very thick, and so rough beneath my fingers. I wonder what skill-less dolt could have manufactured it, or indeed purchased it. I can’t imagine it was me.
Ah. It seems there was no paper after all. Ajua, the girl tasked with watching over me, has informed me I have spent the last twenty minutes tracing letters into the blankets she wrapped around me. Quite fervently, it seems. I am ill. Or not ill, but quite injured, and also quite enjoying the effects of whatever they put in this tea to dull the pain. I knocked my head quite soundly, when I fell some days ago. Don’t tell Ajua, or she will fetch her uncle, the closest thing they have to a doctor here. When it comes to doctors I only want the one. And they would almost certainly not give me more tea.
Ajua says I should rest and has promised to bring me paper and pencil when I’m well enough to sit, if I will just stop this trace-writing now. Sleep seldom means rest these days, but I suppose it cannot be avoided forever. I will return.
~*~*~*~*~*~
August 20, 1893
Some hours before dawn, by the light of a dying fire
My Watson-
(I fully admit I no longer have full right to that endearment. You have plighted your troth, and while I would not deny you your chance at that happy life, just now I find I am in desperate need. Let me be yours once more, if only in my mind. He must needs go that the devil drives.)
Do they have caves in Kandahar? I wonder.
I slept well enough last night and spent much of yesterday lying abed. I did not once ask my hosts for a book, or a deck of playing-cards, or really anything at all I could use to pass the time. My hosts speak mostly some native dialect and Dutch (of which I know maybe three words), but Ajua somewhere learned a little French. It is enough for life’s necessities; food, and urinary relief, and so on. Still, I am deprived even of conversation. It’s perhaps a testament to how sorely my head aches that I have not yet tried to escape this quilted prison.
Tonight, though, that boredom is the least of my problems. For tonight I dreamt again of Kandahar, and of Maiwand, and of the Archduke Salvator. I have never laid eyes on any of them, but I know it as surely as I know the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning. How strange! I cannot explain my certainty but simply knew that I knew. Much as I knew the girl with the bright shining eyes was Ajua, and the boy with the scar across his cheek was her brother Kofi (he was the one who found me when I fell, did I say?). They were Pashtun in their dress and their coloring and their speech and bearing, but they were Ajua and Kofi all the same. There was a third boy, too, older but not old enough. He was fair-skinned and blond-haired, and with an easy laugh I could not help but recognize as your own. I did not know you at that age, of course, but there could be no mistaking him.
The blond-haired boy was laughing, but he still seemed ill at ease, positioning himself between me and the other children. Salvator was laughing, too, and of a sudden there was a pistol in his hand, its bright steel gleaming in the lamplight. Then there was a loud pop, and Kofi lay still at my feet, and the cave’s floor had grown tacky with his blood and when I tried to lift my foot I felt myself grow ill at the way the boot clung to the ground and finally let go with a squelch that echoed through the cave. Then there was another pop, so quick after the first, and Ajua lay there beside Kofi, this time crowned less with blood than brain-matter. And then a third, not even a second later, and this time I could not bear to look, instead retching out my stomach’s contents into the awful mix.
Salvator stood behind me, and above, turning the gun in his hand and marveling at it. “Isn’t it a clever thing,” he said. “Note the cunning mechanics – one must only fire a bullet and a new one is loaded, nearly instantaneous! Truly there is little limit to what the well-governed mind can achieve.”
Beside me, slouched low in her chair beside my bed, I see Ajua is sleeping. Those images had seemed so true, but she is only asleep. Her chest rises and falls in shallow breaths, and almost imperceptibly over the breeze outside the window, I can just make out her snores. It was only a dream, I’m sure you would remind me. Ajua and doubtless Kofi are alive, as are you.
Yes, just a dream, but such dreams can have a kernel of veracity to them. The Viennese alienists would have a proper holiday if ever I fell into their clutches, and though I do not accept the degree of symbolism they ascribe to every element of such visions, nor am I blind to how our well-earned guilts and anxieties have a way of casting their shadows onto those nighttime fancies. I have not owned those thoughts in the day as I should, so they make themselves known under cover of night. Is there not thus some truth in those phantasms?
For you, though: for you, John, I will try.
~*~*~*~*~*~
August 24, 1893.
Well enough past breakfast to feel the need of the privy, and to wish Ajua was here to assist.
Watson-
I am, it seems, at last on the mend. The sun has arisen and so have I. I have had my breakfast, a mash of plantains and maize fried into a fritter (surprisingly good) and a chocolate drink that is oversweet to my tastes but Kofi quite likes. The doctor has come and gone, too, and pronounced me fit enough to move from my bed and into a chair, so long as I do not move overmuch and have the necessary help to keep from putting much weight on it. He is not wholly incompetent, though neither is he you. And he says I might walk some distance with a cane in three weeks’ time. This is what now passes for hope.
Ajua was true to her word, and a board that could serve as a lap-desk along with some small supply of paper was found; and I have been true to mine, and written out the letters I had previously only composed in my mind. Now there is nothing left to continue with my account. It is my turn to be the storyteller, it seems, and yours to serve as judge. The ‘features of interest,’ as you so often had me say, are these.
First: I am now in a small village not far inland from the African Gold Coast. If I was ever told its name I did not commit it to memory. We are perhaps a half-day’s walk from Takoradi, and for me that was its chief and only attraction. You might question the wisdom of a white-faced European seeking anonymity in a small African village, but the cacao-beans they grow here are much sought-after, so my presence here, while unusual, can easily be explained.
There was a sea-captain in Takoradi, a man of Dutch descent named van Dijk. His family’s fortune was made in the slave-trade. Though that business has grown less lucrative in recent years, this latest scion still peddles in human souls when he can find no more valuable cargo. The women unfortunate enough to fall under his control are now destined for a more carnal servitude, in the ports around the Mediterranean, and in recent years he has expanded his reach even to the Black Sea. Some elements of his business suggested a connection to our old friend the Professor, but after close observation I have determined he is but a garden-variety fiend. To my shame it was this possible connection and not the personal injustices he was well known for that drew my attention.
Second: for a man you once credited as in possession of a “cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind,” I sometimes fall far short of the mark when it comes to the execution. When I saw those women in manacles, with one guard called down the pier and the other napping, I took my chance and liberated the key from their captor’s pocket. Never mind that there were perhaps two hundred yards of docks before those women could even hope to reach safety, or that the whole expanse was well-lit and with little enough cover where they could hide. You may applaud the impulse, but the probable efficacy of this little plan surely left much to be desired.
One of the captives was knocked off the pier, and whether she drowned or was recaptured I never learned. The other two made it at least as far as the warehouses, so I hold out some hope they were able to escape. But the first’s splash into the water called back the guard who’d stepped away, and the pier as I said was well-lighted. I was spotted; seen; perhaps recognized. I had no way of knowing if these women had been seized off the street or if they’d perhaps been acquired through more legal means. Were they the victims of lawful commerce (for who knows better than you and I the great distance between lawful and just)? Even if van Dijk had not acted in-bounds of the law, men such as he have always had a way of finding sympathetic magistrates.
I could not give my true name if captured, and I had no convincing alias. I could by no means allow myself to be arrested. So I fled Takoradi that very night. I ran as fast and as silently as I could, making my way first along the beach and then inland across the coastal plain once I could find my way.
Third: Boots making their way across unseen country have a way of catching under tree-roots, and thigh-bones, when thrown down with a body’s full inertia and caught vice-like between said root systems and the tree-trunk have a way of breaking, no matter how much their owners need them in sufficient condition to run. And when one hopes to escape unnoticed into the wilds; well. It is best to take caution, lest your wish be granted. I laid in that field for two days, quite unable to walk or even to crawl, and now we come to the incident with which I started my story. I didn’t know which I feared more, being found and falling under the sway of a man like van Dijk, or lying there unnoticed until at last Proserpina delivered me to her lord’s dominion.
The tale thus far must make me seem half hero and half madman. Never you fear; I am not so easily driven to nightmares of the sort I described by a simple misstep on a dark night. There is yet more to tell, and I am willing to tell it. But just now I am quite tired for all that it is just mid-morning. It seems, if I am yet spared Pluto’s tender mercies, at least Morpheus must lay claim to me for a few hours. More anon.
~*~*~*~*~*~
August 24, 1893.
The grey twilight between sunset and nightfall, when all the world seems full of quiet possibilities.
John-
Night is nearly upon us here, and still I have not completed my tale. Miracle of miracles, I slept through the day, and then Kofi wanted to tell me of the slugs he’d found under a large stone, and I found myself quite obliged to hear him out. But now our little household is getting ready for sleep, and it seems the right time for somber reflection. More crucially, I made you a promise, and I have broken too many of those already. I should delay no further.
So, to resume. I mentioned earlier, in my account of my dream, a certain Archduke Salvator. Perhaps you wonder at the name. I do not expect you to recognize it, for he has never featured in any of our shared investigations, nor is he well known enough to have rated a mention in an English paper. He is, instead, that rarest of all creatures: a nobleman with a scientific curiosity to rival my own, though his secret passions have always been mechanics while I favor chemistry and the science of deduction.
You may have guessed my brother Mycroft has played no small role in orchestrating my travels; if not, I will tell you more fully if (no, when) we meet again. He has provided funds and identities, made introductions to acquaintances of his in the cities where I found myself. If I had made use of him when investigating van Dijk I might have avoided my current injuries altogether; but I had been impatient to begin.
When my quarries were ensconced in more formal social circles such delays were often a necessary evil, as was the case in Budapest. There I suspected a gentleman art-dealer named Ivanov of selling antiquities smuggled out of Istanbul and Odessa. He seemed a likely intermediary between various Russian elements of our old friend’s criminal web. In this instance my suspicion was well-founded (indeed, correct), and Ivanov’s own enterprise was extensive enough, I could not simply lurk on the periphery as I had with van Dijk. No, to investigate him properly required a precise operation, and for that I needed information; hence, Mycroft, and even Mycroft could not assemble that information in a moment.
Knowing me as he did and knowing the time his research would require, Mycroft had included other scraps of intelligence quite unrelated to Ivanov. They were diversions, no doubt, but kindly intended. And one such report concerned Salvator, at that time working in Vienna. He had developed a new weapon, little more than a prototype, but Mycroft had procured some preliminary sketches and asked me to examine them. Again, a tactic and a kindness, all in one. He suggested I procure some space in one of the university laboratories, construct a gun after their design and examine it for mechanical liabilities.
The design was indeed clever. It employed a lever you could use to keep the gun from firing prematurely, but if disengaged, and with the cock of a single hammer, you could fire again and again with no need to load additional bullets or powder. The combustion in its barrel moved the next set of ammunition into place. One could even delay the explosion once the hammer had struck the firing-pin, just by holding the trigger in place. Mycroft was justified in his concern over this cunning new gun, and I, I thought at the time, in my admiration of its designer.
Now, Watson, at last we approach our denouement. Mycroft’s intelligence came together more quickly than either of us had dared hope, and I went to Budapest, confirmed our suspicions, and then did what needed doing in Odessa. At the time I found it exhilarating, though there was little to excite the intellect in that particular chapter, and the work required more blunt force than I often employ. Now, though, I find I have quite lost my taste for those events. Suffice it to say the web’s strands have been severed one from the other, I hope for good, and Ivanov’s associates now pose no further risk to us.
After Odessa I found myself without definitive leads, and thus, for the first time since our parting, without purpose. Van Dijk was not unknown in that city, and I told myself he was just the sort who might be useful to an international network like the Professor’s. He had a reputation for ruthlessness, a disdain for all vestiges of morality, and a skill at operating across national borders. Really, though, it was little more than a whim, and a chance to put some distance between those vast arrays of well-organized criminality. I took my chance and sailed for Takoradi as soon as I could book passage.
You will remember the homeless children who sometimes offered their services to us at Baker Street. You must have thought it purely a utilitarian relationship: they needed coin to buy food and shelter, and I needed eyes, ears, and hands that could pass much more unnoticed in areas of London than I would have been. But I have always had something of an affinity for children at that age. Their minds are so malleable, and particularly primed to understand how the world works. They were necessary, and useful, but also a rare pleasure.
I am reminded particularly of an hour I spent with Agnes in Mrs. Hudson’s kitchens, one rainy Thursday afternoon, when our landlady taught us both how to defeather a goose with the least violence to the meat below. It was a necessary skill if Agnes was to gain employment in a certain butcher’s work-room, and so overhear the gossip that passed between his workers. But what I most remember were her questions. Why did the feathers curve just so, was it perhaps some aid in flight; why did they maintain their stores of fat rather than burning it as they consumed it; would a pointed beak not be a more potent weapon when they hunted for their dinner; and on and on and on. I didn’t know half the answers, nor was I inclined to invest my own time to find out for her, but the questions! The way she saw details and wondered at their cause, and could their arrangement not be improved in some way. I may have to seek her out when I make it back to London and find answers for at least some of her questions. It was quite soothing, sitting around that table and hearing her ask them.
With all that, perhaps it’s no great surprise that I often found myself subject to other children’s interrogations on any number of issues. No, not just subjected; I sought it out. I made my journeys into Takoradi, of course, as it was my raison d’être and sole excuse for staying in the area, which I quite liked. I missed London and you, but even the most diligent of men must on occasion take a sabbath’s rest. But more and more, when I had no pressing need to venture into the greater city, I found myself content to stay in their little village.
Kofi in particular gravitated to me, and brought his friends in his wake. They taught me the names of their stars, I drew them pictures in the ground of what they looked like from London, and when they asked me why the angles were so different (for surely the stars must be the same everywhere), I explained that the earth was like a globe, and here we were near its center so of course the angles would be different.
One day they brought me a metal gear, badly rusted and corroded but not so ruined I could not work out its original design. They asked for my help, and as van Dijk had given me frustratingly little to work with, I put off my planned errand in favor of helping them repair it. We traced out its shape and I taught them something of geometry, and together we fashioned a pair of makeshift compasses using twigs and twine so we could map out the proper dimensions of the gear before it had been most damaged. At the boys’ insistence I went with them to their blacksmith and we devised a gear of the right diameter, width, and shape that I thought stood a fair chance of functioning in place of the damaged component.
I asked them where they found the gear, what it was for, and Kofi grinned up at me. “A gun!” he cried, “a great gun, as large as a cannon. We will fix it and sell it in Takoradi and bring back a caracal cat!” Then he asked me to help them, and I felt bile rise in my throat, though he didn’t seem to notice.
A gun as large as a cannon could be only one of a few things, and given the size of the gear and the number of teeth, the likeliest option was a Gatling gun. It was not so unlikely, with a Dutch fort so nearby; imperial powers had used the great guns in their skirmishes between themselves, I knew, and had turned them just as often against the natives they deemed rebellious. It could have been abandoned so easily.
I thought of the boys putting it together with the gear, thought of my own part in its repair: every bit the necessary component as the gear we’d recreated. I thought of them firing it by accident. One of their bodies would scarcely slow a Gatling round at all. A stone wall would scarcely slow it. And this is what they thought to play at fixing.
“Yes,” I lied. “I will help you.” I would help them smash it to bits if I could; at a minimum I would find some component I could destroy beyond all hope of repairing. I needed these boys to show me the gun they’d found; I would never find the blasted thing on my own. So we went, and I did as I had planned. A shame how the firing pin was bent beyond all recognition and the box of gunpowder was somehow kicked into a nearby tidal pool.
But when at last we came back to their village, I was confronted by my own luggage with the drawings of Salvator’s pistol secreted inside. I had spent a pleasant afternoon glibly refashioning the necessary components of a similar weapon, so absorbed in the geometry and physics of it that I was blinded to its intended purpose. A skilled artillery officer could fire hundreds of rounds with such a gun in a matter of minutes; they were merciless and efficient. So, too, was Salvator’s pistol that I had so admired.
I crumpled the sketches into a tight ball and threw them into the fire, watching them reduce to ash. My copy is gone; but my quiet admiration for the workmanship remains, an indelible image in my mind. This is the fruit of our age of science and reason: tools that can kill great numbers of people in the shortest amount of time possible. And I too must bear its mark. Am I not after all a great advocate of this same science?
This, Watson, is my confession. Confiteor Deo omnipotenti: quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opera: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I looked upon a tool of destruction and marveled at it, and nearly helped small children bring down that destruction on themselves. Now I must lie abed while my leg heals and see those same children run about day after day. God grant me the strength.
~*~*~*~*~*~
October 17, 1894.
You are away at St. Bart’s for the day, and my watch is in our bureau. The hour matters not one jot.
Holmes. Sherlock. My dearest. I offer them all to you, and other names beside; take whichever you most prefer.
I am grateful to have you back among the living, and in London, and most of all to have joined you in Baker Street again. Though truly, Holmes. Dr. Verner? We must work on your powers of obfuscation, if that is the best alibi you can imagine to liberate me of my duties to my former life. I assure you, it was quite unnecessary.
I am grateful, too, that you chose to share these accounts with me. Do not concern yourself with the delay; baring your truest soul to another can be a frightful thing, no matter how well you trust him, and I can well imagine you needed these last months to assure yourself they would be well received. If my words carry any weight here, you have them: I welcomed this insight into your time away, and more than that, this insight into you. If you have other such writings I hope you will share them, without delay or when you believe the time is fitting; and if such moments lie decades in the future, I cherish the anticipation and look forward to the result.
You asked for my judgement on your actions, as a soldier. As a soldier I can only say such judgement cannot be easily rendered. We are all fighting our own wars within ourselves, soldier and citizen alike, and those of us who fight the external war as well must often act in extremis. Mercy is most often called for, and a recognition of how little we understand our fellows’ circumstances.
For you, though, I will chance judgment just this once. As a soldier, it seems to me you are not quite fair to yourself. You killed no one in Takoradi, certainly no children, and if that came down to luck, well, when does it not? I would remind you, too, as one who trained as a doctor and then went willingly to war, I have been called to use weapons against others in defense of my fellows. Some were little more than children; yet you have called me a war-hero. Consider how your standard would judge me, and if you cannot easily accept its conclusion, perhaps be more generous with yourself.
You did not ask for it, but I will take my chance and offer one more judgment, as an author. Reading this account, it was evident you had struggled to pull the words up from within yourself and commit them to paper. I have seen dentists extract teeth with more ease! Do not take this as a critique of your writerly skill, but rather as praise of the courage you showed in the writing, and now in the sharing. I remember how exposed I felt, sick and in distant lands, yet in that moment you dug deep within yourself and chronicled what you found there. I once likened your mind to a delicate instrument, as you remember, but the man who returned to me is something more. The well-honed lens is still a part of you, but so is the man who gives full credit to our more emotional selves.
I admired the man I thought died at Reichenbach, but it is no great leap (if you will pardon the wordplay) to say I more truly love the man who returned. Would that he had endured such growth beside me rather than continents away; but that is a well-hashed argument I must do my best to set aside.
Come home soon, Dearest. I will wrap you in blankets and ply you with sweet tea, and gladly listen as you recount the adventure that was your day. And if you have other plans for our evening, you may well find me amenable to those as well.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Notes
While I’m no great expert in Victorian times, I’ve tried to make this story historically plausible, at least so far as a bit of midnight Googling would allow. The British army did use Gatling guns in the third Anglo-Ashanti War, so it’s at least plausible one might have been abandoned in the area. Lord Salvatore is a true historical figure who designed the first automatic pistol designed as a semi-automatic pistol (as opposed to a traditional gun developed for this purpose. The design isn’t nearly so well-done as Sherlock seems to think, and Mycroft’s intelligence would be very good indeed if he knew about it in 1893: military trials weren’t held until 1896, but the patent was filed in 1891, so it’s possible.
The titular quote is of course from the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. It’s perhaps a bit on the nose, but in my own small way I have tried to have Holmes develop one possible answer, or try to.
Proserpina, Pluto, and Morpheus: If Doyle can have Holmes and Watson swear “by Jove” (Zeus), then certainly I can make use of the rest of the pantheon. Roman names seem most appropriate somehow, but the first two may be better known by their Greek names: Persephone and Hades, the god of the dead and his half-time queen. Morpheus is the god (or demigod) of sleep, who among other things sends Odysseus comforting dreams of his wife while he is separated from them in the Odyssey.
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti: quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opera: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa: A slightly abbreviated form of part of the Confiteor prayer, which a Roman Catholic priest would regularly have recited as part of the mass. A loose translation might be: ‘I confess to Almighty God: that I have sinned excessively, in thought, in word, and in deed: through my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.’ I don’t mean to imply Holmes was Catholic, or even particularly religious, but I can well imagine him reaching for the Latin when the mood struck him. And Holmes in this moment of time, concussed and probably drugged on opiates, would be nothing if not a bit melodramatic.
In light of the current political moment, and in the interest of full disclosure, I should own the fact that I am a white woman writing in a small way about imperialism and race-based violence. I’m also an academic philosopher by training, and while I obviously see a lot in that subject area that’s worth studying (I did go to grad school), I’m not blind to the way several philosophers in this period defined human nature in a way that was racist, sexist, classist, etc. as heck. I hope this story won’t be taken as some kind of definitive comment on 19th century racism – other non-white voices should certainly take precedence – but rather as one quasi-philosopher’s attempt to engage creatively with her own background’s past and present sins. Personally I think Holmes is letting himself off the hook a bit too easily. But hopefully it’s a start.
Thank you to The Small Hobbit for the beta-reading, and to fridaythegowerstreetcat, whose Holmestice request prompted it. We’ve got Holmes/Watson, post-Reichenbach, hurt/comfort, canon-typical violence like woah, hopeful endings, even a smattering of Homeless Network, and given the time period I did my durnedest to keep both Mary and Moriarty as far off-screen as possible. Here’s hoping you enjoyed it!
Recipient:
fridaythegowerstreetcatAuthor: Marta
Verse: Doyle
Characters/Pairings: Holmes/Watson, Mycroft Holmes and Mrs. Hudson offscreen
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Violent themes and imagery. Original character deaths, primarily offscreen. Sexual exploitation as a theme. Frankly excessive use of mythology and of Latin. Canon-typical racism
Summary: “This, Watson, is my confession. Confiteor Deo omnipotenti: quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opera: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Now I must lie abed while my leg heals and see those same children run about day after day. God grant me the strength.”
During the Great Hiatus, Holmes has cause to reflect.
~*~*~*~*~*~
August 14, 1893.
Well past midday
Last night I dreamt of Maiwand. Of the desert sand and the blinding sun and the glimmering bullet passing through my shoulder, and leaving only blood and pus and above all pain in its wake. It is your shoulder, of course, but in my dreamscape it feels so much like mine. I hope you would not begrudge me this use of your crucible; I have my own, I know, but I grow weary of the dank, chilled rocks under the Reichenbach Falls. Sometimes I long for a bit of warmth.
The dream is an old friend: not constant companion, perhaps, but familiar enough I truly should not still be caught so off-guard by those particular phantasms. Somehow, I still am. Most nights I would shake myself awake, gulp down a cup of cool water, brace myself at the window-sill until the night’s breeze could pull me back to the waking-world. But last night there was no water to be had, and when I tried to pull myself to my feet, I howled at the pain that shot through my broken leg. Just as well; I had slept under the open air, and even if I had a window-sill there would certainly be no cooling breezes in these tropical lands.
By Jove, though! What I would give for a gulp of water, cool or hot; or a steadying hand at my shoulder.
~*~*~*~*~*~
August 18, 1893
Early evening; some two hours past the sun’s setting with the first stars newly visible
Watson-
I find myself once more in a civilized estate, with a bed and a pillow and a yam porridge and no small quantity of tea making their way through my stomach and intestines, so I will address you again in the civilized way. Watson. I do like the sound of your name, if only in my mind.
It has been a year and more since we last parted company in Switzerland. There; that is a polite enough way to put it, if I am to play again at refinement? Though of course I desire no such thing. My present hosts offer what comforts they can, but my head aches and my leg aches and my very pulse seems to throb under my skin; and as for conversation and reflection, just now the present reality both begs not to be examined too closely and yet somehow demands it.
You were a soldier, and one left injured far from home; perhaps you would understand.
Or perhaps I only desire your attention, your kind eyes and your knowing smile and the flutter of your breath, rich with brandy, against the back of my neck, as you leaned over my chair to point out some story in the day’s papers, back in our shared rooms in Baker Street. (On that last point, there is no ‘perhaps.’) I should tell you how I came to be here; that is after all the whole point of my constructing this account – but just now I am quite hung up on a single thought. My paper is thick, so very thick, and so rough beneath my fingers. I wonder what skill-less dolt could have manufactured it, or indeed purchased it. I can’t imagine it was me.
Ah. It seems there was no paper after all. Ajua, the girl tasked with watching over me, has informed me I have spent the last twenty minutes tracing letters into the blankets she wrapped around me. Quite fervently, it seems. I am ill. Or not ill, but quite injured, and also quite enjoying the effects of whatever they put in this tea to dull the pain. I knocked my head quite soundly, when I fell some days ago. Don’t tell Ajua, or she will fetch her uncle, the closest thing they have to a doctor here. When it comes to doctors I only want the one. And they would almost certainly not give me more tea.
Ajua says I should rest and has promised to bring me paper and pencil when I’m well enough to sit, if I will just stop this trace-writing now. Sleep seldom means rest these days, but I suppose it cannot be avoided forever. I will return.
~*~*~*~*~*~
August 20, 1893
Some hours before dawn, by the light of a dying fire
My Watson-
(I fully admit I no longer have full right to that endearment. You have plighted your troth, and while I would not deny you your chance at that happy life, just now I find I am in desperate need. Let me be yours once more, if only in my mind. He must needs go that the devil drives.)
Do they have caves in Kandahar? I wonder.
I slept well enough last night and spent much of yesterday lying abed. I did not once ask my hosts for a book, or a deck of playing-cards, or really anything at all I could use to pass the time. My hosts speak mostly some native dialect and Dutch (of which I know maybe three words), but Ajua somewhere learned a little French. It is enough for life’s necessities; food, and urinary relief, and so on. Still, I am deprived even of conversation. It’s perhaps a testament to how sorely my head aches that I have not yet tried to escape this quilted prison.
Tonight, though, that boredom is the least of my problems. For tonight I dreamt again of Kandahar, and of Maiwand, and of the Archduke Salvator. I have never laid eyes on any of them, but I know it as surely as I know the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning. How strange! I cannot explain my certainty but simply knew that I knew. Much as I knew the girl with the bright shining eyes was Ajua, and the boy with the scar across his cheek was her brother Kofi (he was the one who found me when I fell, did I say?). They were Pashtun in their dress and their coloring and their speech and bearing, but they were Ajua and Kofi all the same. There was a third boy, too, older but not old enough. He was fair-skinned and blond-haired, and with an easy laugh I could not help but recognize as your own. I did not know you at that age, of course, but there could be no mistaking him.
The blond-haired boy was laughing, but he still seemed ill at ease, positioning himself between me and the other children. Salvator was laughing, too, and of a sudden there was a pistol in his hand, its bright steel gleaming in the lamplight. Then there was a loud pop, and Kofi lay still at my feet, and the cave’s floor had grown tacky with his blood and when I tried to lift my foot I felt myself grow ill at the way the boot clung to the ground and finally let go with a squelch that echoed through the cave. Then there was another pop, so quick after the first, and Ajua lay there beside Kofi, this time crowned less with blood than brain-matter. And then a third, not even a second later, and this time I could not bear to look, instead retching out my stomach’s contents into the awful mix.
Salvator stood behind me, and above, turning the gun in his hand and marveling at it. “Isn’t it a clever thing,” he said. “Note the cunning mechanics – one must only fire a bullet and a new one is loaded, nearly instantaneous! Truly there is little limit to what the well-governed mind can achieve.”
Beside me, slouched low in her chair beside my bed, I see Ajua is sleeping. Those images had seemed so true, but she is only asleep. Her chest rises and falls in shallow breaths, and almost imperceptibly over the breeze outside the window, I can just make out her snores. It was only a dream, I’m sure you would remind me. Ajua and doubtless Kofi are alive, as are you.
Yes, just a dream, but such dreams can have a kernel of veracity to them. The Viennese alienists would have a proper holiday if ever I fell into their clutches, and though I do not accept the degree of symbolism they ascribe to every element of such visions, nor am I blind to how our well-earned guilts and anxieties have a way of casting their shadows onto those nighttime fancies. I have not owned those thoughts in the day as I should, so they make themselves known under cover of night. Is there not thus some truth in those phantasms?
For you, though: for you, John, I will try.
~*~*~*~*~*~
August 24, 1893.
Well enough past breakfast to feel the need of the privy, and to wish Ajua was here to assist.
Watson-
I am, it seems, at last on the mend. The sun has arisen and so have I. I have had my breakfast, a mash of plantains and maize fried into a fritter (surprisingly good) and a chocolate drink that is oversweet to my tastes but Kofi quite likes. The doctor has come and gone, too, and pronounced me fit enough to move from my bed and into a chair, so long as I do not move overmuch and have the necessary help to keep from putting much weight on it. He is not wholly incompetent, though neither is he you. And he says I might walk some distance with a cane in three weeks’ time. This is what now passes for hope.
Ajua was true to her word, and a board that could serve as a lap-desk along with some small supply of paper was found; and I have been true to mine, and written out the letters I had previously only composed in my mind. Now there is nothing left to continue with my account. It is my turn to be the storyteller, it seems, and yours to serve as judge. The ‘features of interest,’ as you so often had me say, are these.
First: I am now in a small village not far inland from the African Gold Coast. If I was ever told its name I did not commit it to memory. We are perhaps a half-day’s walk from Takoradi, and for me that was its chief and only attraction. You might question the wisdom of a white-faced European seeking anonymity in a small African village, but the cacao-beans they grow here are much sought-after, so my presence here, while unusual, can easily be explained.
There was a sea-captain in Takoradi, a man of Dutch descent named van Dijk. His family’s fortune was made in the slave-trade. Though that business has grown less lucrative in recent years, this latest scion still peddles in human souls when he can find no more valuable cargo. The women unfortunate enough to fall under his control are now destined for a more carnal servitude, in the ports around the Mediterranean, and in recent years he has expanded his reach even to the Black Sea. Some elements of his business suggested a connection to our old friend the Professor, but after close observation I have determined he is but a garden-variety fiend. To my shame it was this possible connection and not the personal injustices he was well known for that drew my attention.
Second: for a man you once credited as in possession of a “cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind,” I sometimes fall far short of the mark when it comes to the execution. When I saw those women in manacles, with one guard called down the pier and the other napping, I took my chance and liberated the key from their captor’s pocket. Never mind that there were perhaps two hundred yards of docks before those women could even hope to reach safety, or that the whole expanse was well-lit and with little enough cover where they could hide. You may applaud the impulse, but the probable efficacy of this little plan surely left much to be desired.
One of the captives was knocked off the pier, and whether she drowned or was recaptured I never learned. The other two made it at least as far as the warehouses, so I hold out some hope they were able to escape. But the first’s splash into the water called back the guard who’d stepped away, and the pier as I said was well-lighted. I was spotted; seen; perhaps recognized. I had no way of knowing if these women had been seized off the street or if they’d perhaps been acquired through more legal means. Were they the victims of lawful commerce (for who knows better than you and I the great distance between lawful and just)? Even if van Dijk had not acted in-bounds of the law, men such as he have always had a way of finding sympathetic magistrates.
I could not give my true name if captured, and I had no convincing alias. I could by no means allow myself to be arrested. So I fled Takoradi that very night. I ran as fast and as silently as I could, making my way first along the beach and then inland across the coastal plain once I could find my way.
Third: Boots making their way across unseen country have a way of catching under tree-roots, and thigh-bones, when thrown down with a body’s full inertia and caught vice-like between said root systems and the tree-trunk have a way of breaking, no matter how much their owners need them in sufficient condition to run. And when one hopes to escape unnoticed into the wilds; well. It is best to take caution, lest your wish be granted. I laid in that field for two days, quite unable to walk or even to crawl, and now we come to the incident with which I started my story. I didn’t know which I feared more, being found and falling under the sway of a man like van Dijk, or lying there unnoticed until at last Proserpina delivered me to her lord’s dominion.
The tale thus far must make me seem half hero and half madman. Never you fear; I am not so easily driven to nightmares of the sort I described by a simple misstep on a dark night. There is yet more to tell, and I am willing to tell it. But just now I am quite tired for all that it is just mid-morning. It seems, if I am yet spared Pluto’s tender mercies, at least Morpheus must lay claim to me for a few hours. More anon.
~*~*~*~*~*~
August 24, 1893.
The grey twilight between sunset and nightfall, when all the world seems full of quiet possibilities.
John-
Night is nearly upon us here, and still I have not completed my tale. Miracle of miracles, I slept through the day, and then Kofi wanted to tell me of the slugs he’d found under a large stone, and I found myself quite obliged to hear him out. But now our little household is getting ready for sleep, and it seems the right time for somber reflection. More crucially, I made you a promise, and I have broken too many of those already. I should delay no further.
So, to resume. I mentioned earlier, in my account of my dream, a certain Archduke Salvator. Perhaps you wonder at the name. I do not expect you to recognize it, for he has never featured in any of our shared investigations, nor is he well known enough to have rated a mention in an English paper. He is, instead, that rarest of all creatures: a nobleman with a scientific curiosity to rival my own, though his secret passions have always been mechanics while I favor chemistry and the science of deduction.
You may have guessed my brother Mycroft has played no small role in orchestrating my travels; if not, I will tell you more fully if (no, when) we meet again. He has provided funds and identities, made introductions to acquaintances of his in the cities where I found myself. If I had made use of him when investigating van Dijk I might have avoided my current injuries altogether; but I had been impatient to begin.
When my quarries were ensconced in more formal social circles such delays were often a necessary evil, as was the case in Budapest. There I suspected a gentleman art-dealer named Ivanov of selling antiquities smuggled out of Istanbul and Odessa. He seemed a likely intermediary between various Russian elements of our old friend’s criminal web. In this instance my suspicion was well-founded (indeed, correct), and Ivanov’s own enterprise was extensive enough, I could not simply lurk on the periphery as I had with van Dijk. No, to investigate him properly required a precise operation, and for that I needed information; hence, Mycroft, and even Mycroft could not assemble that information in a moment.
Knowing me as he did and knowing the time his research would require, Mycroft had included other scraps of intelligence quite unrelated to Ivanov. They were diversions, no doubt, but kindly intended. And one such report concerned Salvator, at that time working in Vienna. He had developed a new weapon, little more than a prototype, but Mycroft had procured some preliminary sketches and asked me to examine them. Again, a tactic and a kindness, all in one. He suggested I procure some space in one of the university laboratories, construct a gun after their design and examine it for mechanical liabilities.
The design was indeed clever. It employed a lever you could use to keep the gun from firing prematurely, but if disengaged, and with the cock of a single hammer, you could fire again and again with no need to load additional bullets or powder. The combustion in its barrel moved the next set of ammunition into place. One could even delay the explosion once the hammer had struck the firing-pin, just by holding the trigger in place. Mycroft was justified in his concern over this cunning new gun, and I, I thought at the time, in my admiration of its designer.
Now, Watson, at last we approach our denouement. Mycroft’s intelligence came together more quickly than either of us had dared hope, and I went to Budapest, confirmed our suspicions, and then did what needed doing in Odessa. At the time I found it exhilarating, though there was little to excite the intellect in that particular chapter, and the work required more blunt force than I often employ. Now, though, I find I have quite lost my taste for those events. Suffice it to say the web’s strands have been severed one from the other, I hope for good, and Ivanov’s associates now pose no further risk to us.
After Odessa I found myself without definitive leads, and thus, for the first time since our parting, without purpose. Van Dijk was not unknown in that city, and I told myself he was just the sort who might be useful to an international network like the Professor’s. He had a reputation for ruthlessness, a disdain for all vestiges of morality, and a skill at operating across national borders. Really, though, it was little more than a whim, and a chance to put some distance between those vast arrays of well-organized criminality. I took my chance and sailed for Takoradi as soon as I could book passage.
You will remember the homeless children who sometimes offered their services to us at Baker Street. You must have thought it purely a utilitarian relationship: they needed coin to buy food and shelter, and I needed eyes, ears, and hands that could pass much more unnoticed in areas of London than I would have been. But I have always had something of an affinity for children at that age. Their minds are so malleable, and particularly primed to understand how the world works. They were necessary, and useful, but also a rare pleasure.
I am reminded particularly of an hour I spent with Agnes in Mrs. Hudson’s kitchens, one rainy Thursday afternoon, when our landlady taught us both how to defeather a goose with the least violence to the meat below. It was a necessary skill if Agnes was to gain employment in a certain butcher’s work-room, and so overhear the gossip that passed between his workers. But what I most remember were her questions. Why did the feathers curve just so, was it perhaps some aid in flight; why did they maintain their stores of fat rather than burning it as they consumed it; would a pointed beak not be a more potent weapon when they hunted for their dinner; and on and on and on. I didn’t know half the answers, nor was I inclined to invest my own time to find out for her, but the questions! The way she saw details and wondered at their cause, and could their arrangement not be improved in some way. I may have to seek her out when I make it back to London and find answers for at least some of her questions. It was quite soothing, sitting around that table and hearing her ask them.
With all that, perhaps it’s no great surprise that I often found myself subject to other children’s interrogations on any number of issues. No, not just subjected; I sought it out. I made my journeys into Takoradi, of course, as it was my raison d’être and sole excuse for staying in the area, which I quite liked. I missed London and you, but even the most diligent of men must on occasion take a sabbath’s rest. But more and more, when I had no pressing need to venture into the greater city, I found myself content to stay in their little village.
Kofi in particular gravitated to me, and brought his friends in his wake. They taught me the names of their stars, I drew them pictures in the ground of what they looked like from London, and when they asked me why the angles were so different (for surely the stars must be the same everywhere), I explained that the earth was like a globe, and here we were near its center so of course the angles would be different.
One day they brought me a metal gear, badly rusted and corroded but not so ruined I could not work out its original design. They asked for my help, and as van Dijk had given me frustratingly little to work with, I put off my planned errand in favor of helping them repair it. We traced out its shape and I taught them something of geometry, and together we fashioned a pair of makeshift compasses using twigs and twine so we could map out the proper dimensions of the gear before it had been most damaged. At the boys’ insistence I went with them to their blacksmith and we devised a gear of the right diameter, width, and shape that I thought stood a fair chance of functioning in place of the damaged component.
I asked them where they found the gear, what it was for, and Kofi grinned up at me. “A gun!” he cried, “a great gun, as large as a cannon. We will fix it and sell it in Takoradi and bring back a caracal cat!” Then he asked me to help them, and I felt bile rise in my throat, though he didn’t seem to notice.
A gun as large as a cannon could be only one of a few things, and given the size of the gear and the number of teeth, the likeliest option was a Gatling gun. It was not so unlikely, with a Dutch fort so nearby; imperial powers had used the great guns in their skirmishes between themselves, I knew, and had turned them just as often against the natives they deemed rebellious. It could have been abandoned so easily.
I thought of the boys putting it together with the gear, thought of my own part in its repair: every bit the necessary component as the gear we’d recreated. I thought of them firing it by accident. One of their bodies would scarcely slow a Gatling round at all. A stone wall would scarcely slow it. And this is what they thought to play at fixing.
“Yes,” I lied. “I will help you.” I would help them smash it to bits if I could; at a minimum I would find some component I could destroy beyond all hope of repairing. I needed these boys to show me the gun they’d found; I would never find the blasted thing on my own. So we went, and I did as I had planned. A shame how the firing pin was bent beyond all recognition and the box of gunpowder was somehow kicked into a nearby tidal pool.
But when at last we came back to their village, I was confronted by my own luggage with the drawings of Salvator’s pistol secreted inside. I had spent a pleasant afternoon glibly refashioning the necessary components of a similar weapon, so absorbed in the geometry and physics of it that I was blinded to its intended purpose. A skilled artillery officer could fire hundreds of rounds with such a gun in a matter of minutes; they were merciless and efficient. So, too, was Salvator’s pistol that I had so admired.
I crumpled the sketches into a tight ball and threw them into the fire, watching them reduce to ash. My copy is gone; but my quiet admiration for the workmanship remains, an indelible image in my mind. This is the fruit of our age of science and reason: tools that can kill great numbers of people in the shortest amount of time possible. And I too must bear its mark. Am I not after all a great advocate of this same science?
This, Watson, is my confession. Confiteor Deo omnipotenti: quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opera: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I looked upon a tool of destruction and marveled at it, and nearly helped small children bring down that destruction on themselves. Now I must lie abed while my leg heals and see those same children run about day after day. God grant me the strength.
~*~*~*~*~*~
October 17, 1894.
You are away at St. Bart’s for the day, and my watch is in our bureau. The hour matters not one jot.
Holmes. Sherlock. My dearest. I offer them all to you, and other names beside; take whichever you most prefer.
I am grateful to have you back among the living, and in London, and most of all to have joined you in Baker Street again. Though truly, Holmes. Dr. Verner? We must work on your powers of obfuscation, if that is the best alibi you can imagine to liberate me of my duties to my former life. I assure you, it was quite unnecessary.
I am grateful, too, that you chose to share these accounts with me. Do not concern yourself with the delay; baring your truest soul to another can be a frightful thing, no matter how well you trust him, and I can well imagine you needed these last months to assure yourself they would be well received. If my words carry any weight here, you have them: I welcomed this insight into your time away, and more than that, this insight into you. If you have other such writings I hope you will share them, without delay or when you believe the time is fitting; and if such moments lie decades in the future, I cherish the anticipation and look forward to the result.
You asked for my judgement on your actions, as a soldier. As a soldier I can only say such judgement cannot be easily rendered. We are all fighting our own wars within ourselves, soldier and citizen alike, and those of us who fight the external war as well must often act in extremis. Mercy is most often called for, and a recognition of how little we understand our fellows’ circumstances.
For you, though, I will chance judgment just this once. As a soldier, it seems to me you are not quite fair to yourself. You killed no one in Takoradi, certainly no children, and if that came down to luck, well, when does it not? I would remind you, too, as one who trained as a doctor and then went willingly to war, I have been called to use weapons against others in defense of my fellows. Some were little more than children; yet you have called me a war-hero. Consider how your standard would judge me, and if you cannot easily accept its conclusion, perhaps be more generous with yourself.
You did not ask for it, but I will take my chance and offer one more judgment, as an author. Reading this account, it was evident you had struggled to pull the words up from within yourself and commit them to paper. I have seen dentists extract teeth with more ease! Do not take this as a critique of your writerly skill, but rather as praise of the courage you showed in the writing, and now in the sharing. I remember how exposed I felt, sick and in distant lands, yet in that moment you dug deep within yourself and chronicled what you found there. I once likened your mind to a delicate instrument, as you remember, but the man who returned to me is something more. The well-honed lens is still a part of you, but so is the man who gives full credit to our more emotional selves.
I admired the man I thought died at Reichenbach, but it is no great leap (if you will pardon the wordplay) to say I more truly love the man who returned. Would that he had endured such growth beside me rather than continents away; but that is a well-hashed argument I must do my best to set aside.
Come home soon, Dearest. I will wrap you in blankets and ply you with sweet tea, and gladly listen as you recount the adventure that was your day. And if you have other plans for our evening, you may well find me amenable to those as well.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Notes
While I’m no great expert in Victorian times, I’ve tried to make this story historically plausible, at least so far as a bit of midnight Googling would allow. The British army did use Gatling guns in the third Anglo-Ashanti War, so it’s at least plausible one might have been abandoned in the area. Lord Salvatore is a true historical figure who designed the first automatic pistol designed as a semi-automatic pistol (as opposed to a traditional gun developed for this purpose. The design isn’t nearly so well-done as Sherlock seems to think, and Mycroft’s intelligence would be very good indeed if he knew about it in 1893: military trials weren’t held until 1896, but the patent was filed in 1891, so it’s possible.
The titular quote is of course from the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. It’s perhaps a bit on the nose, but in my own small way I have tried to have Holmes develop one possible answer, or try to.
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Proserpina, Pluto, and Morpheus: If Doyle can have Holmes and Watson swear “by Jove” (Zeus), then certainly I can make use of the rest of the pantheon. Roman names seem most appropriate somehow, but the first two may be better known by their Greek names: Persephone and Hades, the god of the dead and his half-time queen. Morpheus is the god (or demigod) of sleep, who among other things sends Odysseus comforting dreams of his wife while he is separated from them in the Odyssey.
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti: quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opera: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa: A slightly abbreviated form of part of the Confiteor prayer, which a Roman Catholic priest would regularly have recited as part of the mass. A loose translation might be: ‘I confess to Almighty God: that I have sinned excessively, in thought, in word, and in deed: through my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.’ I don’t mean to imply Holmes was Catholic, or even particularly religious, but I can well imagine him reaching for the Latin when the mood struck him. And Holmes in this moment of time, concussed and probably drugged on opiates, would be nothing if not a bit melodramatic.
In light of the current political moment, and in the interest of full disclosure, I should own the fact that I am a white woman writing in a small way about imperialism and race-based violence. I’m also an academic philosopher by training, and while I obviously see a lot in that subject area that’s worth studying (I did go to grad school), I’m not blind to the way several philosophers in this period defined human nature in a way that was racist, sexist, classist, etc. as heck. I hope this story won’t be taken as some kind of definitive comment on 19th century racism – other non-white voices should certainly take precedence – but rather as one quasi-philosopher’s attempt to engage creatively with her own background’s past and present sins. Personally I think Holmes is letting himself off the hook a bit too easily. But hopefully it’s a start.
Thank you to The Small Hobbit for the beta-reading, and to fridaythegowerstreetcat, whose Holmestice request prompted it. We’ve got Holmes/Watson, post-Reichenbach, hurt/comfort, canon-typical violence like woah, hopeful endings, even a smattering of Homeless Network, and given the time period I did my durnedest to keep both Mary and Moriarty as far off-screen as possible. Here’s hoping you enjoyed it!
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I could sing just as many praises to that single, final Watson letter. It was perfect, from the voice to the reflections, to the suggestions he made as a writer and soldier. I particularly loved this segment:
A gorgeous moment to close a gorgeous fic. I am quietly slipping this into my "faves" folder. Thank you so much for writing this, and even more so for sharing it with us ❤️
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I confess (!) that I was also surprised by the Latin. I find it easy to believe that, despite his bohemian disposition, he would have learned the general confession of Cranmer's prayer book from chapel at school and university. But the Latin! a family history of Catholicism? art in the blood? merely, as you suggest, a temperamental inclination to drama? In any case, a curious detail to tease the brain.
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I know from my own experience that writing in the nineteenth century idiom is *so* hard to get right, but this is utterly note-perfect.
I feel thoroughly spoiled that someone wrote this as a gift for me. Thank you so very, very much.
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