Chapter Text
Dear Reader:
By now you’ve heard the news, I have no doubt. That’s what brought you here, after all; the nostalgia for the old days, when John’s blog was the most entertaining thing on the internet, when the tale of Two Ridiculous Men could quicken the blood and send the imagination racing.
My blogger was always quick to praise me, always with a sense of fond exasperation, or at least, so I like to think.
I hope you will all indulge me this chance to set the record straight. As always with things like fanciful fiction or even more fanciful “Tales Based on Real Events,” you only see the side of the tale your storyteller wishes you to see. So you may have decided today to scroll through this blog and wear, for a time, his own breathless wonder at our derring-do, our rash recklessness to charge headlong into danger to tease loose some puzzle and keep my “bloody great brain” occupied, if only for a time.
There is another tale, however, a tale that I’ve carried close to my vest for a very, very long time now. And now that his tale is done, I presume to unfold my own, here in the ashes of the life he glorified and, by doing so, made in itself glorious. The truth, however, is hardly so spectacular—
Except in the way it changed me, slowly, by degrees, over the span of years. After all, that is what real friendship, real companionship, and yes, a real love can do to a man.
That is the tale I wish to tell, the story of the sociopath I was, the army doctor I met, and eventually the man I became so that I might be even in some small way worthy of him.
If you are still so inclined, then, reader, read on . . ..
Sherlock Holmes