Work Text:
"Watson, that is quite disgusting." Sherlock Holmes eyed me suspiciously as he stood in the doorway with a tray. I was in bed in my room in Baker Street, some weeks after my friend had completed the case which I would later publish under the title A Study in Scarlet.
"I'm sorry, Holmes, but I've caught a chill." I blew my nose again and folded my poorly abused handkerchief in half.
"I sent the boy around the corner to purchase more handkerchiefs." Holmes said as he approached my bed and set the tray down on the bedside table. He sighed.
"I blame myself, I should not have kept you out in the rain with your constitution in such a state. I feel I should make up for it." His slender fingers twisted together anxiously.
I frowned at him. "It's as much my fault as it is yours my dear fellow. I should have stayed here in the warm, but I thought I might be of use to you." I decided to change the subject and distract him, he had such a queer expression on his face. "What did you bring?"
Holmes paced, picking up things from my dressing table and putting them back down again in restless agitation. "Broth. Mrs Hudson believes it to have curative powers." He sniffed, and I could tell he disagreed but was trying to be kind so as not to jar my nerves. It was certainly uncharacteristic.
"There is also tea."
I smiled to myself. One could always trust Mrs Hudson to provide tea. I raised my hand to take the teacup but it shook slightly and rattled the cup against the saucer.
"Watson." Holmes said sharply. "You are shaking."
"It is the fever," I told him dismissively. "I'll come out alright but I should have some of this tea and the broth and try to sleep. I am really starting to feel a bit the worse for wear." I wrapped my blanket more tightly around my shoulders and watched him pacing around the room. He was making me dizzy, so I tried to pick up the cup again hoping tea would calm my nerves, but Holmes was too quick for me. He took the cup from my hand and shook his head.
"Physician heal thyself, eh friend Watson?" He quirked an eyebrow as he poured the tea and held the cup to me. I took it, trying hard to still my hands and Holmes moved his fingers quickly away from my contaminated ones. It was not one of Mrs Hudson's best cups, I noticed vaguely.
"Thank you." I said when I had taken a long sip. "I'm sure I can manage now."
He nodded and started to pace again, the way he did when he was agitated. He lit a cigarette and watched me avidly as I set the cup down with the utmost care and tried to pick up the spoon and dip it into the broth to eat. I did well at first, but it soon seemed like too much effort to continue. I tried to pretend I was finished eating and had decided to try and sleep. I settled myself back into my pillows and watched him pacing, one hand cocked on his hip and the other holding his cigarette and gesturing slightly. I knew him well enough by now to know that he was working something out.
He saw me looking and frowned at me, coming over to sit in the chair drawn up next to my bed. He gave the small pile of used handkerchiefs on it a dubious glance. I hastily brushed them to the floor and was rewarded with a sardonic half smile.
"You can manage? I think not Doctor. This illness is on my account, and I will see the balance paid. If you continue managing you will spill tea on your sheets and our noble landlady will find some way to blame me, I have no doubt."
"Holmes, I appreciate the gesture, but--" I wasn't able to finish because he was pressing the teacup to my lips and I was forced to open them or have tea spilt down the front of my dressing gown. I swallowed some tea with some chagrin and he took the cup away and replaced it with a spoonful of broth. He continued in this fashion, methodically alternating between the two in some pattern I could not fathom. I simply opened my mouth in the required shape and drank whichever liquid he proffered. It seemed easier than protesting, Sherlock Holmes was rather an odd fellow after all.
Holmes began to tell me about one of his recent chemical experiments and I half listened to him as he alternated tea and broth, and I was feeling a bit like a child in the nursery listening to bedtime stories. I determined my fever was either growing worse or I was exhausted because I was having trouble following what Holmes was saying and seemed to be getting a bit blurry around the edges. Probably fever and exhaustion both.
"Holmes?" I said, when I realized that he had stopped his tea, broth, tea routine. He was still talking. He seemed to have moved on to German composers, but I wasn't following the thread of his argument.
"I should probably sleep now."
"Yes of course my dear fellow."
I resettled myself in bed and closed my eyes, waiting for the scrape of the chair against the floor and the sound of his step. When it did not come after a few minutes, I opened one eye to peer at him.
"Holmes? Are you going?"
"Ah no, Watson. I have brought a commonplace book up with me and I think I will just make some notes in it before dinner." I opened both eyes then and saw that he did indeed have a commonplace book perched on one knee and was writing in it with a lead pencil.
"Oh."
"Get some sleep Doctor, I am sure I will have need of you in the morning."
I tried to ignore him and sleep, but I was feeling that strange sort of tiredness that comes on when you're ill, the kind that makes the body ache while the mind turns in dizzy circles. I could hear the gentle scraping noise of Holmes' pencil on the paper of his commonplace book, and the soft sound of his breathing. The coverlet felt very rough under my fingertips and the collar of my nightshirt felt too tight. I wondered if this was how Holmes felt all the time.
Eventually I dozed off, and I spent a long while half asleep in that strange land between dreaming and waking. I was dimly aware that the light was fading in the room and then that Holmes had lit the lamp. I think Mrs Hudson came in once with a pile of handkerchiefs and another tray, and I think there was a hushed conversation about supper and Holmes was waving her away impatiently. I think someone tried to get me to swallow some more tea or maybe water, but I would not sit up and drink.
It was pitch dark when I woke again, my body on fire and my sheets drenched with sweat. Something was holding me down and I thrashed against it, imagining myself back in the field hospital and burning with enteric fever. My mouth felt dry and my head ached.
"Hush Doctor. It is only me."
I saw a pale face looming in the darkness above me, aquiline nose and glittering grey eyes peering at me. His dark hair was mussed and I thought later that it gave him a roguish appearance, but at the time I kept struggling, sure he was some sort of monster out of my nightmare.
"Watson. Stop struggling. You will do yourself harm." The pressure on my chest lessened as he took his hands away and lit the lamp, then replaced one hand on my sternum. He laid the other on my brow, and pressed me gently but firmly onto my pillow. I think seeing his face clearly in the lamplight must have woken my reason because I stopped thrashing.
"Now, Watson. We are going to look at your illness logically."
I stared dumbly at him.
"Logically. You are a medical doctor. You know that the mind is the most important weapon against any weakness."
He wasn't making sense, but I couldn't tell if it was my fever or his theories.
I felt the bed dip, and he was suddenly stretched out at my side. I felt his feet twitching against my blanket covered ones. It felt strange and sent an odd thrilling sensation through me that I thought must be leftover from my nightmare.
"Watson, I want you to train your mind to stop thinking about the fever. If you ignore the needs of the body my dear fellow, your mind can work far more efficiently."
I tried to follow his argument and found that my head ached far to much to make much sense of it.
"I'm sorry Holmes, I do not follow."
His hands were twisting in his lap, fingers twining in and out. I watched them while I waited for him to answer.
"No matter Watson, we will talk of it later." He seemed like he was about to stand then, either to go back to the chair or even go down to the sitting room. The prospect of being alone suddenly seemed like too much.
"Holmes?"
"Yes Doctor?" He seemed awfully close, and I was tempted to lay my head against his chest.
"Will you stay with me?" It had to be the fever talking, because I would not have dared such a thing if I was in my right mind.
"I have no intention of leaving." I felt Holmes' arm go around my shoulders companionably and then I did lean my head against his chest. It seemed the only thing to do. I hoped he wouldn't think less of me when I was well again, but I confess it seemed hard to worry about such things.
"If you give me your illness Doctor, I expect you to play nursemaid."
I smiled into his dressing gown. "Of course Holmes."
"Quite so." He said and tightened the arm around me.
"Tell me about your first case." I said because I wanted to hear his voice. It seemed somehow important that he keep talking to me.
"Ah no. The tale of the Gloria Scott not a story for the sick bed."
"Something else then?" I shivered, no doubt on account of the fever, and burrowed closer to his side. Surely this was all the fault of the illness. I felt his other arm move and knew he was placing one finger on his lips in thought.
"Well Watson, I will tell you about a trifling mystery I solved when I was at university. I'd been shut up in my rooms for a week after a particularly grueling set of exams - I received top marks of course, but the ennui was on me - when a chap by the name of Lennox came by to consult me. He was in a most miserable state, Doctor, and he had quite an interesting little problem."
"Ah." I mumbled.
"Well Lennox had heard of my small skill from another of the boys in my year, a fellow called William Borrough, who had been in quite a scrape over a girl. I needn't tell you Watson how I felt about that mess, you know my opinions on the fairer sex..."
I listened to his story for quite some time I think, but I stopped following the finer points in order to concentrate on the rise and fall of his narrow chest and the rumble of his voice as he spoke. It lulled me until I was quite comfortable, despite the fever and the delirium. I evidently fell into an uneasy sleep after that because I cannot recall the end of his story. I think I must have dreamed, because I thought I felt the brush of his lips against my forehead and two arms holding me tightly as the fever took me again.