Chapter Text
The last time I made love to John Watson was three weeks ago.
We’d just returned home from the Sussex-based office of the doctor John had been seeing since we’d first moved to the country ten years prior, Dr. Nigel Smith. I hadn’t liked him from the start; he seemed lazy and overly superficial to me, always joking with the both of us about our minor celebrity status and how boring the change to our lives must have been. He’d inherited his practice from his father, who’d apparently been cast in the same mold as my John: a decorated war hero and lifelong preserver of the life and health of his countrymen.
This good doctor’s son tried to deliver the news of John’s esophageal cancer with his standard bad humour, and to say it fell flat would be the understatement of the century. We both sat across from him, wordless and transfixed by our reactions: For John, one of pure shock, his jaw dropped in disbelief; for me, wordless rage that this imbecile could think there was anything funny about the news he was delivering: malignant, metastasized, really remarkable how quickly it was spreading . . .
Two weeks. I would only have John for two weeks.
I was incandescent with my rage when we returned home. Of course we returned home; John was mulish, and refused to listen to reason. That was what prompted the most violent display of my temper in over a dozen years; after all, why should I mute my distress when, in two short weeks, it would all stop mattering?
John was tired. That was something I’d grown accustomed to, and it irked me now. Every sign of what was happening to him irked me: the fatigue, the lack of appetite, the heartburn we’d joked about so often. He had been wasting away before my eyes and I’d been blind to it, so enamored I’d been of my beehives and the hours and hours of time I now had to conduct my little experiments. None of it mattered anymore. The only thing that mattered was two weeks, and how could I possibly have enough of him in that time, when no amount of his attention had ever been enough?
We had a one-sided row. I hurled accusations at him, mean-spirited jibes that he’d known this was coming, how could he not, he was a doctor after all; he’d known and he’d kept it from me, kept me contented with my ignorance while he wasted away and hoarded the knowledge of his impending death like a martyr. He was no saint, I’d said. There would be no chapels, no sacred spaces dedicated to his sacrifice after he was gone. He’d been nothing more than selfish, and how could I. How could I?
“I mean, how could you? How could you, John?” I was crying at this point, and I turned away from his soft, sad eyes.
“I didn’t know,” he said softly. Again. He’d been saying it the whole time. “Once you reach this age, Sherlock, you tend to see every morning as a miracle.” He put his hand, now covered in liver spots and wrinkles, over top of mine where it rested, trembling, on the top of the table at which he’d sat. “And every morning already is a fresh miracle, because more often than not you’re there with me.”
I sank into my own chair, heaving deep breaths into my lungs. I let him fold me into his arms, because that was what we did when the world became too much, and I was devastated to think that, in this moment of exposed mortality, he once again took to comforting me. I was always the weak one, you see? He was always the strong one, the one who protected, who comforted, who took precautions and gave care.
“It’s my fault,” he murmured into my hair as I sobbed into his chest. “All my fault. You’re right, I should have seen, but I had grown careless. Our luck always held, didn’t it? I turned it all off, Sherlock, because our luck always held.”
I knew what he was referring to, and I didn’t care. So what, if he turned off all of his self-diagnostics and ignored the warning signs. I had no device for traveling through time, so I could not go back six months and warn him that heartburn wasn’t always a symptom of spicy food, sometimes it was the warning of an unfriendly visitor to your body.
I couldn’t save him, and thus began the worst time of my life.
But first, John took me to bed.
At first, it was just for a nap. I realized with a churning, anxiety-ridden stomach that he’d been napping so much lately, it had become something of a joke between us. Nothing seemed funny anymore. The well of laughter he’d planted in my heart when he told me he was in love with me dried up that day.
We lay together, pressed close, and I was observing him differently now: instead of feeling contentment and comfort in his touch, I felt only dread. Every inhale and exhale drew him that much closer to the last, and I clutched at them, and I despaired.
After a doze, he came to and resolutely set about removing my clothing.
I meant to protest, I did. I meant to tell him to cling to every moment of his life, and not waste any of it reassuring me this way, because now every reassurance diminished what time was left between us. But I saw in his eyes the cold glint of steel, like I had so many nights chasing the criminal element through London. I saw his resolve, and his determination, and I heard in his shaking whisper of appreciation for me what he meant by it all:
What does my life mean, if it isn’t spent loving you?
It was tender and true, and every ounce of pleasure wrought by my endlessly talented John was heartbreaking. No matter how often I insisted I was beyond such sentiment (and the insistences were thick on the ground until that photo taken of us in Regents Park), I do have a heart, and it hurt so much that day that I didn’t know if I would survive it, and thought that dying with him would be a grand thing to do.
I had apparently started babbling into the silence of our bedroom, because John started to shush me: “No, love, no. You are not done yet. Please don’t say that. Don’t die, Sherlock, my gorgeous black swan, don’t even think it. There’s one more adventure in you yet.”
When we were done striving together for that once-elusive and now well-known land of bliss, and we lay spent in each other’s loose embrace, I traced the old pockmark of the bullet wound on his shoulder. He picked idly at the small crater on my chest, the remnant of the damage done by his wife.
“It’s how I need to think of you,” he whispered, finally. The sweat on my body was cooling quickly, and I pulled the blankets up from where he’d flung them and allowed them to flutter down over us.
“What is?” I asked.
He smiled at me. “The famous Sherlock Holmes, coat swirling—”
“I don’t have that coat anymore.”
“Don’t I know it,” he whispered sadly. “Lady Smallwood tried to replace it after it burned in that fire, but nobody got it quite right.”
I nodded. It was true. We’d handled a lot of Queen-and-Country (well, King-and-Country, now, I suppose) cases for Lady Smallwood after the adventure of the Risen Moriarty. We’d been incandescent, brilliant to the point of being supernatural, and the only injury we’d suffered in all that time had been the loss of my coat in a warehouse fire.
“What I’m trying to say is, all of this is going to be far more difficult if I am forced to watch you waste away, too. You have to endure, Sherlock.” He leaned up on an elbow and I saw him wince with a little bit of the pain we’d associated with old age. I wasn’t so sure of that, anymore. “You have my heart in your keeping, right? And as long as that’s alive in you, I’m not dead.”
Two weeks later, a week ago, he said something very much like that on his death bed: “You’re immortal now,” he whispered to me. “The books.” He gestured through our bedroom door at the door to his study, where the physical incarnations of our adventures sat on a shelf, waiting for him to return and leaf through them with that small smile on his face. “You’re legendary now, Sherlock, and I’m honored to have been there to see it.”
I shook my head at him. “You are greater than I am,” I whispered back. The afternoon was made for soft murmurings; one of those clear, crisp days in early March when winter clings to the frosted windows, but the sun burns through the frost by mid-afternoon.
I’d had to say things like this to him very often over the years, and he always dismissed them with a smile and a flick of his wrist: Pshaw, you’re exaggerating, you biased arse. In his more indulgent moods, belly full of a big meal and satisfied after an energetic run through London then a frenzied roll in bed, he’d elaborate: “Oh, my life has been fine, lots of interesting things going on—but you made me more.”
The idea caught in my mind, then, that I should use the time after his death to explain my side of things; finally, I would have the room and the time to do so, without his constant interference and insistence that it was not necessary.
This tale, then, has been my final adventure, the long overdue homage to the best man I’ve ever known, the most selfless, strongest, funniest, bravest, and brightest man, a man whose very concept would have seemed impossible to the young genius junkie who’d lived in Montague Street. Mycroft once called him the making of me. He was at least right about that much.
The evening John passed away was lovely and cool, the scent of petrichor creeping in through our bedroom window. I was propped against our headboard, and I had John curled against me, his back to my chest, my arms around his waist. I breathed in time with his labored breaths. I breathed deeply of the scent of his silver hair, and I let him feel the tears that would not stop falling from my eyes. I whispered to him all the things I’d never had the courage to say, all of my weakness and doubt, all of the ways he’d saved me, I counted them back to him one by one.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” he whispered, and then, “I love you, William Sherlock Scott Holmes.” He clutched my hand in his weak, trembling one, then slipped away.
There was no one to hear my wailing. There was no one to keep my from the extremity of my grief. The only thing that has kept me alive is my determination to see this tale through to the end.
But Dear Reader, I hope you understand now that I’m tired. I don’t have John to mind me anymore, and I don’t have to mind him. The house has, therefore, fallen into an unforgivable state of dishabille, not the tidy, organized appearance it had for years. I’m afraid I’m rather rumpled, myself; I have not shaved in weeks. I have not laundered my clothing. I have done nothing but keep my bees and my silence, attending only to the whispered musings of the ghost in the house.
Am I satisfied with how this tale has concluded? Oh, I wouldn’t say that. John thought I was legendary, and in a way he tried to tell me it made me rather an immortal. I wish I were, honestly, but only if he could be with me. Life with him by my side was an exhilarating rush through adventure and madness, with lovely spaces of contentment and joy throughout. Life without him holds no appeal to me, none at all. Despite my bees, it is a wasteland of grey.
I am, however, satisfied that I have made my point. I am little more than a ridiculous boffin, after all. I solved puzzles for a long time, and often in the service of the Angels, as Moriarty would have said. I was never one of them, I maintain that even now.
But John was. Turn to him if you want to know what a hero is. Turn to him to understand me, and whatever in the world could have made me noteworthy. Read his words, certainly, but remember mine, whispering to you that he is more deserving of admiration and respect, because he made me what he thought I should be.
The evening has rolled in. I think, Dear Reader, this may be my last. If you will excuse me, I plan to take this glass of wine with me into John’s study, that long undisturbed place, and breathe deeply one more time of the scent of him, absorb his presence there. I’ve missed him, you see, and I need him now. I feel very alone, and I don’t want to be, haven’t wanted to be in decades. I will retire to my doctor’s presence and stay there until I’m done.
I wish you well.
Regards,
Sherlock Holmes
EPILOGUE
Sherlock Holmes obituary
The Guardian, 8 April, 2046
William Sherlock Scott Holmes has died aged 70 in his home in Bognor Regis, West Sussex.
Mr. Holmes, who in his role as a private consulting detective achieved a great deal of fame and renown, passed away on April 5th. He was found in his study at home by Molly Lestrade, a long-time friend. He is survived by his nephew, Ramsay Holmes, son of his elder brother, Mycroft Holmes.
Mr. Holmes achieved celebrity status in the early 2010s, when his long-time friend and assistant, Dr. John Watson, began to publish stories of their adventures in his personal blog. He was credited with the capture and conviction of dozens of murderers, thieves, and criminals who would compromise the security of His Majesty’s realm. In his later years he retired to Sussex to establish a well-regarded beekeeping operation. He will be remembered by many forensic scientists as an innovator in the field, as well as many fans who still faithfully return to Dr. Watson’s blog. A final post on the blog, apparently written by Mr. Holmes himself, was the prompt that led Mrs. Lestrade to look for him and ended in her fateful discovery.
A memorial service is to be held on the 12th of April at 11:00 am in St. Paul’s for all who may wish to pay their respects to Sherlock Holmes.
Molly closed the cover to her tablet after reading the obituary and laid it on her lap. She was tired, and she felt that she had aged ten years (ten years I can’t afford, she thought) in the past week.
But she could not help her bittersweet smile. She wasn’t sure how much longer she’d have to wait to join her own hero (Greg had been gone for five long years now), but she had always known that Sherlock wouldn’t survive long without his John.
She thought again about that last blog post, about the way Sherlock had ripped the bandage off his bleeding heart and exposed it to the world, and her brittle smile fell away. She closed her eyes and thought about the way it had been, all those years ago, to watch his genius and how he’d blossomed when John had stepped through that lab door. We were so young, she thought, and pictured herself in that yellow affair she’d worn to John’s wedding, then the blue one she’d worn to the Holmes/Watson wedding, then the white cocktail dress she’d worn to her own. So young, and so stupid. We wasted so much time.
But in the end it had been no waste at all. This was how happy endings really turned out, after all; a little old woman sifting through her happy memories to keep away the sharp, black despair.
She shook her head and got to her feet. Tea. That would fix it. That would remind her of those times, and the breathless delight, and the laughter of her friends.
That would be enough.