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Watson's ground-floor consultation room has a high window that washes the room with the oblique light of early winter, and this evening he can feel the chill in his bones. He is just writing down some notes on his final appointment when he hears his secretary walking briskly along the corridor.
"The gentleman insisted that he would see you despite the late hour," Elsie says apologetically.
"Very well," Watson says, with some small irritation. "Thank you, Elsie, and do you think I could prevail on you for a cup of tea before you leave?"
"It is a little frigid in here," she says in agreement. He hears her walking briskly back down the corridor, speaking to somebody in the next room. In the empty office, Watson massages his right deltoid for a moment, then sorts the papers on his desk. He sees movement from the corridor, and looks up to greet the patient, but of course it is Holmes. He is leaning in the doorway, smiling faintly, dressed impeccably for Town. He looks good; well. Watson rises immediately from behind his desk, attempting with some small success to hide the stiffness in his joints.
"Holmes! I knew it was you!"
"My dear fellow," Holmes says, and he steps forward and takes Watson by the shoulders, smiling widely. "How did you know it was me?"
"A last-minute consultation on a night like this, Holmes, would be either you or a case of influenza."
Holmes puts his head back in a sudden shout of laughter, in that peculiar way he has. Elsie walks in with the tea tray--there are two cups--and Watson takes it into the sitting room.
Watson has known Holmes for well over thirty years, and yet his friend's sudden appearances (and just as abrupt disappearances) still have the power to amaze him, even if he is not surprised. Watson no longer feels the frustrations of his long workday, the gloom of the cold afternoon. He pours himself a cup of tea and one for Holmes, and they settle in to the chairs under the window.
"I was hoping for something stronger, Watson," Holmes says, then drinks deeply of his black tea nonetheless.
"I'd wager money you haven't eaten breakfast, let alone lunch," Watson says. "I'll ask the housekeeper to rustle us up something quick. Two cups."
"Very well," Holmes says. Negotiations having been concluded, he puts down his empty cup and goes to the brandy decanter on the sideboard. Watson refills it, and then he calls for the housekeeper.
Holmes is curled into his armchair, and as Watson turns back around his face goes carefully blank. He is worried about something. They will get to it in time.
So that was Sherlock Holmes, Elsie thinks as she files away the last of the patient notes. The tall, restless man sprawled in her waiting room had been Sherlock Holmes. As she gathers her things and locks the patient door, she decides that he was younger than she thought, but that the man in the magazines is better looking. It isn't until she's standing on the Tube platform that she remembers his eyes. He had such interesting eyes, she thinks, and then the clatter of the train chases away any more fanciful thought she might have had.
Holmes fills Watson in on Miss Russell's health. Her wound is healing as well as could be expected. They speak of Watson's writing (Watson carefully veers away from any mention of Conan Doyle), then a trip he is planning to America. Holmes speaks of his hives and spends some time expounding on bee venom and 'nervous secretions', which to Watson seems like utter claptrap, but he doesn't say.
Holmes still looks tired, but he had a hard summer and a wearying autumn, and Watson suspects that he has not slept well the last few nights. Nonetheless, Watson is satisfied by his friend’s appearance, considering how he seemed a couple of months ago, and his spirits lift further.
Holmes pours a brandy and settles in with his second. "I think your shoulder is paining you, Watson."
Watson nods. "It is this dreary weather."
The housekeeper arrives with supper, saving Watson from having to change the subject. When she has closed the door behind her, he says "You never told me about your adventures in Palestine, Holmes. I assume it was a thrilling interlude."
Watson watches as Holmes smiles to himself, perhaps a little bitterly. His voice is flat and careful.
"That was merely a mission I carried out on behalf of my brother--mainly as a way of removing Russell and I from our enemy's scrutiny long enough to plan a course of action."
Watson tastes the stew appreciatively.
"Come, man, you have shared these confidences with me before. You have complained to me often enough about your brother's requests. Give me some credit."
Holmes stares down at his plate for a long time, and when he speaks his voice is tight.
"It was something I did for Mycroft, Watson, and it would not interest you."
That is as good as a dismissal, coming from Holmes, and they spend the rest of the meal in a silence that is not uncompanionable, even if it descended on them abruptly.
Holmes came to him, twelve months ago now, on a night not unlike this one, with shaking hands and eyes that would not meet his face. He had resumed his drug use, for no particular reason that Watson could see. He asked for Watson's help. That was what made it different from the other times.
He lay in Watson's spare room and sweated out the shame and self-hatred. Watson searched the cottage under some pretext, then brought Holmes home and gave him succour when he needed it, goaded him from his bed when he needed that, too. He had been weak and shaky for days. In the weeks following, he was very quiet, and Watson had despaired of his health for some time.
When Russell came down from Oxford, some weeks later, she sent Watson a very carefully-worded letter in which she delicately enquired as to whether or not he was concerned about Holmes' health. Watson had replied by next post, first offering avuncular good wishes, then stating in the barest clinical terms that he thought Holmes was experiencing a depressive reaction to overwork, that he would recover in time, and that he would welcome Russell's company, even if he made it plain that he did not desire it.
He knew that if he prevaricated she would catch the train down to London and question him in person--she was so like Holmes, sometimes. He did not mention the drug use that was wound up in the illness. Holmes did not want anybody else to know. Watson kept Holmes' secret and keeps it still, because Holmes asked, and because Russell is still so young, and he hopes that she will never know what a terrible thing Holmes harbours inside of him.
Watson wipes the last of the excellent beef stew from his plate with a crust of bread. Holmes has also eaten well enough, after his own fashion; at least the brandy and the food have blunted some of his nervous energy. Holmes rises and pours another brandy for them both, bringing Watson's over to his chair. He does not sit down, but stays standing before the fire, his back to Watson.
"I am sorry, Watson. I deceived you again. I should have let you in on the little charade Russell and I were playing out for that woman. It was for your own good."
Watson takes a quick burning gulp of his brandy. It is an old hurt, Holmes' varied deceptions. He looks up to see that Holmes has turned toward him. He is watching him over the rim of his glass, his flat grey eyes bright in the light of the fire.
"For my own good that I should worry myself sick about your health? Worry that you had resumed your old habits?"
"I suspect, Watson, that you knew that wasn't true."
That much is correct, Watson must admit. When Watson visited Holmes in May, he had found his friend thin and sickly. But although there was an empty cocaine vial displayed ostentatiously in the wastepaper basket and a few red needle marks on his arms, Watson had not seen any of the usual signs of drug use, the languid stupour of the opiate or the frenetic energy of the cocaine. His eyes had been clear, meeting Watson's not with shame or defiance but with a curious sort of desperate anger. Yes, Watson thinks. His friend's sobriety was intact; he could tell by his eyes. So Watson had known, then, that Holmes was playing at some dangerous game, but he had appeared so genuinely unwell that the notion had given him no comfort.
"Very well, I give you that. I still do not know why I must always act as your dupe. I could have--"
"You could have what, Watson? Miss Donleavy's father ran us ragged across Europe. It was not at all like what you wrote in your story. I could not have another member of that odious family destroy people I loved. It was bad enough having to worry about Russell--"
Holmes' voice is high and strident. He cuts himself off, then, draining the last of his brandy in a large mouthful. He sets the glass down hard and folds himself into his chair with an ease that makes Watson jealous, then reaches into his pockets for his tobacco pouch.
Watson is proud of the story he wrote, after Moriarty. It was written in grief, and so he had given Holmes what felt like a final gift. He went to the falls expecting his death, but Watson had made that indifference to his own destruction seem heroic. But it had not been that way. They were trapped and harried, during their flight to Switzerland, and Holmes' final fight with Moriarty was desperate and messy and frantic.
Having packed his pipe, Holmes lights it and shakes out the match violently, his eyes on the drifting smoke. When he speaks, his voice is calm again.
"He would have never acted so rashly. I was disappointed in the daughter, in the end."
"They often disappoint you, don't they, Holmes?"
"Yes," Holmes says, his voice low, and he turns to look Watson in the eye again. "Please, Watson, forgive me."
Holmes does him the favour of not promising that it will not happen again. They have known each other so long.
"Very well," Watson says. "I understand."
Holmes sits in his chair with his legs crossed, smoking, one foot beating out a rhythm only he can hear. He has one of Watson's visiting cards in his hand, and he makes it disappear and reappear in a quick, fluid act of sleight of hand. It is a long time since Watson has seen him perform this kind of trick. There is definitely something worrying at him.
After the housekeeper reappears to clean away their plates, Holmes rises and knocks his pipe out into the fire. He stands there as he did before, staring into the flames.
"In Palestine." he says, then breaks off to clear his throat. Watson pauses with his own glass to his lips, then sets it down. When Holmes speaks again, his voice is flat.
"In Palestine, I was riding in a car when the driver was shot by a sniper. The car crashed. I was concussed. Before I knew what had happened, there was a gun to my head. I was taken to a small house I did not know and tied to the ceiling with a hook. There, a man whose face I never saw... applied burning cigarettes to my back and. And whipped me. He wanted information, which I did not provide. I would have, eventually."
Watson does not know what to say. He knows that Holmes does not want his pity. "Show me," he says, quietly.
Still facing the fire, Holmes slips off his jacket, loosens his tie, unbuttons his waistcoat and shirt. Watson sees a slight stiffness in his shoulder as he takes off his vest. He rises, then, and goes to Holmes. He places a hand gently on his shoulder so he can turn him toward the light of the fire, and he when he does that he feels Holmes stiffen involuntarily.
There are deep white pockmarks: cigarette burns. There are larger scars, too, healed but still red. One stretches over the right shoulder blade, which would explain the stiffness. There is nothing Watson can do here. It turns his stomach.
"Oh, Holmes," he says, and Holmes turns to him, then, and Watson sees that his eyes are wild and haunted, almost mad, and Watson grasps him by the shoulders, as Holmes did when they met, but this time he draws Holmes toward himself and wraps him in an embrace, his hands oh so careful on the scars on his back.
Holmes says something like "Oh," and breaths deeply into Watson's shoulder. He pushes back, then, and reaches for his vest, wrenching it back over his head with a quick movement. Watson retreats to his chair and lights a cigarette while Holmes dresses himself and wipes his eyes discreetly on a shirtsleeve.
Watson wrote Holmes as a passionless automaton because he knows that Holmes prefers himself to be known this way. Watson knows that in truth he is ruled by great passions, which he would prefer to keep tightly controlled. He views his swooping emotional storms, his dark moods, as a failure, if he recognises them at all.
Holmes digs his own cigarette out of his silver case once he has shrugged his jacket back on, lights it with a quick, almost furtive movement. Do the cigarettes remind him, Watson wonders, of a burning point of pain pressed to his back? Does he awake in the night with the man's voice in his ear?
"What became of the man?" Watson asks, because he has a sudden burning desire to know if the animal who committed these acts is still alive.
"He took his own life," Holmes says, simply, as if he is too tired to say any more. He sits back down.
"Just another of my failures for you to bear witness to, Watson."
"Is that why you have come here tonight, Holmes?"
"I do not know why I came here, Watson."
Watson knows. It is because he needed a friend.
Watson rings for coffee. He feels perhaps that Holmes needs it; there is an old tiredness behind his eyes. Watson adds milk and sugar to his own cup, pours a larger black cup for Holmes. Holmes shifts uncomfortably in his chair, and Watson wonders if he is about to launch into one of his lectures, a lengthy digression on some macabre subject or other. He does this when he is uncomfortable, or when his mind is elsewhere.
Instead, he places his feet flat on the ground and stares at the carpet between his feet. He speaks very deliberately.
"Irene Adler bore me a son. In France. After she sent me away."
Watson takes a near-scalding mouthful of coffee and swallows it down anyway. They have discussed, of course, how Holmes had a liason with Irene Adler while he was 'dead', but they have not talked about it often. Watson's wife was sickening and dying. That period in time holds fond memories for neither of them.
The lash he is feeling on his back is not the failure in Palestine, Watson thinks. It is his own failure to recognise that he had a son.
Holmes rises, suddenly, and reaches into his pocket for an envelope that he crushes into Watson's hand.
"Read this," he says, and he retreats into himself, then, drawing his legs up to his chest and smoking prodigiously.
Watson reads the letter twice over. He reserves all of his anger for Mycroft, for his infernal secrets and schemes. He knew of the boy's existence well before Holmes moved to Sussex. Watson thinks back on the way Holmes was at that time, and he wonders how Mycroft could have possibly kept the secret to himself then, when Holmes seemed to have given in to his despair. It would have been a 'distraction', of course, from certain tasks he needed performed. An abominable act of manipulation and subterfuge, Watson thinks, but he keeps this opinion to himself.
He folds the letter back into the envelope and hands it to Holmes. Three (or four) brandies on a weekday evening is a little excessive, but the situation demands it, so Watson returns to the decanter and pours them both a generous nip.
"I should have known," Holmes says, not meeting Watson's eyes as he takes the glass, immediately raising it to his lips.
"There are many things I could say to you," Watson says. "You had not had much experience with such matters. It was not spoken of in polite company at the time."
"I have thought of those things," Holmes says, his tone a little acerbic.
"What if you had known? Would you have stayed?"
"No. She had made it clear that she wanted me to leave. That she never wanted to see me again."
Holmes' jaw clenches tight. Watson thinks of the Holmes who came back: thin and angry, pursuing the remnants of Moriarty's gang with cold savagery, unknowingly making an enemy of the man's daughter. There was very little human connection in him, then. It had taken a long time for him to come back. Was that what he was like when he was with her; was it the falls? Or was that a reaction to her rejection?
Holmes' mother took her own life when he was a boy. His father was an unhappy and broken man who, Watson suspects, cast the blame on his sons because he could not place it on himself, who indulged himself in swooping rages. It is probably easier for Holmes to think himself unworthy of such attachments. That is how it has been between the two of them.
"She said she would return to America," Holmes continues. "She also said that I was a tiresome, arrogant, deceitful drug addict. All of which was true, I suppose."
If he had known about the boy, he would have gone back eventually. She knew she had to rid herself of him, completely, before he could ever know. She had used his pride against him. A rare beauty, Holmes had called her, but Watson had always found her intelligence more striking than her beauty. Watson wonders suddenly what kind of voice the lad has, and he feels a strange stab of sorrow.
"I can see no failure here, on your part," Watson says. "Only-- Oh Holmes, all those years. I am sorry."
Holmes draws hard on his cigarette in reply, then casts it into the fire.
"Are you on your way to France now?"
"You read the letter, Watson. The lad is hardly in any position to receive his long-lost father now. I will go back to Sussex. Russell will be stronger yet in a few days."
"Miss Russell? Holmes, she has suffered a great shock. Are you sure it's wise--"
"Russell will be strong enough in a few days," Holmes says, his voice firm, in a tone that Watson knows means he will brook no argument. He drains his coffee then, and they sit silently for a while. The clock strikes in the hallway, and Holmes rises to his feet.
"I will not detain you any longer, Watson," he says.
"You are welcome here at any time, you know that."
"You are, as ever, unimpeachably wise and sensible, Watson," Holmes says, as he walks down the hallway. "I am in your debt."
He leaves Watson standing with his hand on the doorknob, staring thoughtfully at his oldest friend's back as he strides off into the dark street.
Watson supposes that he should be jealous of Russell, who with her youth and her intellect now has Holmes’ companionship. And yet Watson knows what a burden Holmes' love and loyalty can be. He supposes that Russell knows that now, too.