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Her departure: a cloud slipped in, gathered her things. And would've slipped out unnoticed, if Clyde's cold scaly feet hadn't chosen that moment to hustle across the library floor, ancient reptilian toenails digging into Sherlock's torso, so that he opens his eyes and jumps to his feet. No coincidence, his brain calculates: the tortoise was surely smelling and seeking Watson's warmth, her willingness to provide scraps.
Precious few scraps there for Sherlock. Alive, yes, as he'd been told, and that is truly worth seeing; but no one so weary-looking would be heading out the front door unless she couldn't bear to stay.
Sherlock's eyes dart, searching for clues but afraid to meet hers. "I'm told my brother has an unexpected talent for keeping secrets." Her fist tightens on her suitcase handle. "Is he going to keep you, then? In a better style than -" (he realizes he might be misunderstood, ignores it, speads his toes to draw strength up through the brownstone's cracked parquet floor) "- this shabby one to which you have of late become accustomed?"
"Mycroft," she says, "has already shared more than I cared to hear." Never one to sneer, his Watson, but he notes how her upper lip pulls itself away from her own breath as it shapes his brother's name. He can't help but feel glad of that. He sees, too, how the muscles in her upper arm quiver from fatigue, and he starts to take the suitcase -- so light! She has always traveled light, like a bird -- but she wrenches it out of his grip.
"Why?" he asks helplessly.
"This one is for you to solve yourself," she tells him, her face in shadow. "I can't help you." And then the door closes again and it is only him and Clyde.
* * *
"I can't help you," she'd said -- but perhaps the others might? He doesn't know how to ask. Doesn't know if asking is even allowed.
Perhaps he can show: the depth of his abjectness, his need. Not on himself, of course. The world (aside from certain specialists in its oldest profession) demands a modicum of grooming, a token of self-respect.
At a bar near Wall Street, he swipes a broker's toupée. The perfect hairshirt for a tortoise. Sherlock adds tiny barbs where they won't snag Clyde's delicately flavored flesh. His own is a different matter, but that's what he deserves for lacking a shell -- not counting his bookshelf cache, and no, that was counted out, even if he had to count each day, each hour, each minute, one by one.
* * *
Sherlock still hasn't figured out how to show anyone Clyde. Too much to hope that Watson keeps the brownstone on webcam. Could he invite people in? Trump up an excuse to bring home Gregson or Bell? But when he returns from the precinct that evening, alone, the toupée is perched on Angus. Minus its barbs, and underneath -- some kind of hat? His brain supplies the syllables he'd failed to understand as Ms. Hudson had crossed his path, hurrying down the brownstone steps: "No time to weave tweed."
Knitted in hasty loops: a deerstalker.
Not a penitent, then. A hunter. A detective.
He can do this.
* * *
Or at least so Sherlock tells himself, for the next 52 hours and 20 minutes, until Gregson slips in a question about how he's doing without a partner -- not really probing, maybe just a polite pro forma inquiry -- and Holmes confesses: it feels, all the time, as if someone had just punched him in the solar plexus.
"Funny -- I never shared that trick with your partner," Gregson drawls, flattening his vowels. "Guess she figured it out on her own." The captain's face grimaces, half-twitch and half-wink, as Gregson rises and taps the files he holds edgewise against his desk, knocking them into alignment.
* * *
"Painkillers," Sherlock mutters, watching Bell crack open an amber vial of prescription ibuprofen. Doing it one-handed too, just to show off. Sherlock isn't sure what small demons -- envy? guilt? -- keep pushing him to comment to Marcus, about Marcus. But for once he shuts up.
It's the right answer. In the silence, something changes. Bell relaxes for a moment, and the tension reforms itself as attention.
"Joan ... " starts Marcus, and Sherlock doesn't even blink at the change of topic, because really, that has been the topic all along. "Joan still lives by a certain code."
True, thinks Sherlock. New project: to list all the ways he fails to live up to her standards, relevant or irrelevant. It isn't until he is headed back from a pre-dawn case, through the glow under the neon sign of a pharmacy on Avenue Y, that his mind's eye recalls Bell's finger, tapping the prescription label's caduceus. As always, it shows two snakes wrapped around the rod of Asclepius, god of physicians. (Or rather, what American medical institutions mistook for the rod of Asclepius. But this is no time to sneer.)
On Ms. Hudson's next afternoon cleaning binge (and she's been cleaning with suspicious industry -- Sherlock's cache might or might not have survived), he brings the subject around -- subtly, he hopes -- to a point where he can drop Asclepius's name. From there, he knows her love of Ancient Greek texts will bring them to Asclepius's most famous invocation (from which, like Sherlock, he has since been banished): the Hippocratic Oath.
"First, do no harm," Sherlock probes. "But we can't do all our experiments on corpses. How did Hippocrates expect science to progress without violating a few live bodies?"
"I've always felt," says Ms. Hudson, with her characteristic feminine delicacy, "that the man was a minimalist. Elegance of proportion -" as her featherduster sketches the brownstone's lofty ceiling lines in the air - "keeps the unthinkable at bay."
"When I'm looking for the greater good, I rarely consult the principles of interior decor."
"Well, there's your problem. So easy to prove one's masculinity as a rough man standing ready to do violence so that others may sleep peacefully, as if one could sleep peacefully with some dolt at the foot of the bed. Honestly, Sherlock, I'd have expected better of you. I know you practice martial arts -"
"And how do you imagine said arts might best be deployed?"
"To do what is needed, and no more." She self-consciously halts her dusting of a shelf she has dusted twice today. "Much like Lao Tse -- " and from this point, deprived of its dusting distraction, her train of thought hijacks Sherlock onto a Silk Road of philosophy, non-stop from Ancient Greece to Taoism, until he is dizzy from mental travel and still does not know what he is being shown.
After she leaves he sits in his armchair and stares up at the corner where his cache might still be, until he stands and walks quickly towards the bookshelf, starts to put one foot on the ladder -- and then pushes off it, launching himself half-lurching, half-running, out of the house and two blocks further before slowing long enough to speed-dial Alfredo.
* * *
Dusk by now, and another neon sign: a diner this time. Sherlock orders coffee but can't pick up his cup without letting Alfredo see how badly his hands shake. Alfredo says nothing. Sherlock stares at the waitress until he deduces that she is a Dresden-born actor who took the job three days ago as a form of Stanislavskian practice for one of three possible parts currently being cast in local productions. He has already devised a trick to determine which audition she plans to attend, and is about to deploy said trick into motion when he notices Alfredo, most uncharacteristically, poking at his phone.
"You seem ... more distracted than I am."
Alfredo stares, and lifts an eyebrow.
"Just coffee, today? No cars to break into? Are you still tutoring Watson, by the way?"
He nods. "She's a good student. Remembers what I teach her. Uses it, too. Even when she's panicked."
Sherlock doubts this is true. Why is Alfredo saying it? Alfredo always has a point.
"Are you saying I don't?"
"I'm saying you didn't."
"When didn't I?"
"When did you panic the hardest?"
"Are you saying that when Watson is ab- " he begins to stammer again, takes a sip of coffee, doesn't care if his sponsor sees his hands shake, that's what they get for filling junkies with coffee at their meetings - "is abducted, I should be breaking into a car?"
Alfredo laughs. A wonderful laugh. Too happy for sarcasm.
"Yes, Sherlock. That is exactly what I am saying."
There is no way to make sense of this. Sherlock breathes, letting his diaphragm pulse until suddenly, there is only one way to make sense of this. He grasps the solution, sinks back in relief. He has solved the puzzle. But how to fix the problem? And speaking of fixes ...
"You should know. I came here because ... it seemed unsafe. At the brownstone."
Alfredo swipes open his phone again.
"I appreciate you telling me that. Go up to the roof. The roof should be safe, by the time you get back."
Sherlock runs. Smoothly, this time.
* * *
She is there, with the bees. Waiting for his words.
As he stumbles onto the roof, two snaking chains of language tangle in his mind, his throat. One: the abject apology that has been writhing inside him since she left, since long before he knew why. And two: the second snake, the unwinding solution: he could have broken into the car. Hell, he could have used Herr Yoder's keys. All that time they wasted wrapping the floor in plastic, waiting for the Swiss security manager to wake up. If he'd broken in, he would have checked the glove compartment, found the flashdrive, found the list. Instead, the torture ...
-- and he knew, didn't he? That this was what had offended Watson? Why else go to such lengths to display, via Clyde, the image of a medieval penitent sinner, unless to claim that Sherlock was torturing himself, as if that somehow validated the real, nonconsensual deal ... not torture, he had told himself, because no limbs were truly strangled, but he knew the medical definition, knew that he had violated it. The second snake opens its fangs: that violation of Watson's, Gregson's, everyone's trust had been unnecessary: a waste of seconds, in point of fact. Worse, for him at least: a waste of Watson's time, lengthening her captivity, bringing her closer to that deadline. In his mind's eye, the two snakes cross paths again. Which snake to take? Apologize? Or convince her that he has solved the case that she had set him?
He splits the difference.
"I'm an idiot," he says. And knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, he has solved it.
Her smile. Slipping out of the clouds: a moon. Watson's smile.