Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Endings are always so amusing, aren't they?

Not necessarily in the ways they end, or the matters or manners of what and how they wrap up, but the concept, if that makes sense.
Sherlock isn't a writer. He supposes it needn't make sense.

It is that, precisely, that he contemplates now, on the thirteenth hour of the sixth month since the finale of the case upon the isle off Ardnamurchan. Sixth months, zero weeks, zero days, and thirteen hours. He'd count to the second if he'd been lucid enough at, or since, the conclusion in order to draw a more accurate measurement. As the matter stands, most of that information came from the mouth of a tepid writer - unfailing liars - who, if Sherlock were being reasonable in his critique, was also rather unprepared for the events, and preoccupied enough not to be at the constant behest of his pocket watch - compounded, even still, by the loss of that connection with J.H Watson, the elder, as the instrument was cast into the ocean in a fit of companionable revival.

Still. Unsettled waters and unsettled days are hardly a worthy prologue for an unsettled mind.

The ending to Watson, the younger,'s latest (and, only, full) published tale is sure to be amusing. Presumably. If he must confess, even in the privacy of his own mind with only one judge, supposedly, bearing witness, he has yet to read Watson's latest manuscript.

It's a pretty day, almost. A little of the London fog has parted; not enough of the smog, perpetual, to make a day that would be sunny in Chiswick cloudy in London, centre. On many days, he would consider this day rather beautiful - less crime on a sunny occasion, after all. Despite what some may say, if they have known him either too briefly or much too long, he does not enjoy that crime exists - or, rather, that which has negative effects: that which should be criminal - but that it proves so stimulating to his mind as to be quite purposeful. Regardless. He is still a mammal, still human, and does enjoy feeling the sun rest on his face, even when parted through a single pane of glass, and filtered through miles of of London sky as the sun rotated around it.

The good doctor Watson would say the day is beautiful, and perhaps a number of other things, and he would not be wrong. He is still aspiring in this career of his; he is prone to fancy. The little he has read of his writing, while Watson worries away to almost the nail beds, is, well. He tries not to actively discourage - not to his fancy, but the narrative does provide many key clues, often, and demonstrates a little prowess in explanation and almost a sense of intrigue, but the detail is always in lack. Should he be provided with the text alone to examine all possibilities within a case, even Sherlock would struggle to find a conclusion that fit neatly, let alone the correct one. Whenever he mentions this, however, the doctor regresses, and curls in on himself as if trying to escape the words bodily, so he leaves it be. He lets things rest unsaid. He stops reading them. This was all some time ago.

The first published piece sits as solely undusted on the mantle, barring to constant influx and output of letters from the door, to the dagger, to the data shelf. It's short, and brief: published as an addendum of sorts during the Winter months - he thinks in Breton's manual.

Just a list, really. The opening to a piece, more than one, complete corpus. He had seen doctor Watson draft it with his pen staining his lips steadily black, whilst he occupied Sherlock's typical chemist den. It hadn't taken long for Sherlock, those two and two-third years back when it had been first drafted, to realise it was about him. Well, that was all in the past now. Whether the paper's frequent dusting was due to his own tampering, or the frequent readings of another, he is unsure. It is accompanied by a short introduction to two vital characters: equal parts smearing as it is adoring, almost as if in praise.

The first draft had been unceremoniously burned, as is the doctor's way, and the fourteenth had made it's way into the annual.

The full piece, as far as his information goes, sits upon his coffee table.

'Politics: Feeble' - really. He knows everything about politics- how it is essentially, in the situation of the Empire, run through a very small handful of men and one monarch, of which, one he knows intimately. How it is self-serving and narrow and essentially pointless barring it's ability to keep water running into his flat and cases into his lap. That tingle of irritation still crawls up his neck at the thought, and that interrupts, with brief spasms, the exact holding of his bow. He sighs and loosens his wrist. Too tight, his grip, lately.

He casts the thing aside, but gently. His first ever teacher, hidden in the rafters with and as the boy of his youth, would not put a kind eye on him using the gift that cost him a dear amount of sorrow and woe. It is practically useless in his hands, presently, anyway. The notes haven't been right lately - his hand unkind to even the most sorrowed and simplest of tunes.

It is an irritation, really.

He still thinks at the ending of the first true publication of John H Watson. If it were accurate to the real events, those unusual, but now seemingly quite succinct, days after he first met the revolutionary doctor, he is quite sure that they will be amusing. Two men settling, alone and together at last, in a flat as if all that comes their way will be as conclusory -as capable of conclusion-, as if anything they face will be as solvable as this. Farcical, honestly. He should have known as much from Cordona - perhaps if grief in it's duality had not stuck him quite so hard - that little is made to last, and fewer than you intend to.

The days of rationality seem far behind the bumping horse-cart of life.

All that waits is beyond, but the windows have fogged, and the smog is too far and too close to see. Something moves beyond and within it, and smog begins to seep into the carriage; it curls up his legs and licks at his arms, and, there, arises the water-

It's a fairly sunny day, today. He can still hear the sound of violin, even whilst none plays.

The notes lie, not alone. Stabbed, driven through, are the innumerable notes of Mycroft Holmes. None read, and hand growing increasingly unsteady. Perhaps a stab of gout, again. More likely, some emotional distress. A backlog, unanswered, of six months may do that to a person.

Regards to Mycroft's personal health, he does not truthly care. If the man did, he would have visited more than twice in the past half-year, instead of leaving stacks of notes - often bi-weekly - to clog his in-tray.

That, or perhaps amusing for the fact of Watson's irritation. The little naggings he made to the police for months afterwards were quite amusing, in a soft sort of way. If he had to put a dart, true and pinning, to exact the cause, he would say it burgeoned on sentiment, the way a man fallen by the sea-side had the waves burgeon upon him, he supposes.

He notes the man as a little unreliable in his tales, to tell truth absolute. He doesn't think of himself nearly as charming as the good doctor insists upon him. Even his family have met their ends at his hands - does he really expect anyone will stick around out of supposed charm alone? Watson would be a wiser man if he followed the suit of Mycroft as opposed the sake of one's heart and his name.

He fought so hard to have Sherlock's name in print and enlit, emboldened. Nothing came to pass of it until he took it into his own care, his own hands, except for perhaps parsing the pieces he, contemporarily, thought pithy from years past in the Chronicle of Cordona, which itself was a negligible effort, but the doctor had allowed him to achieve some appreciation of in years past. Regardless of impact, it held intent, which he is steadily becoming to believe has much the same resonation, truly.

That, itself, he finds amusing. Less in the manner that someone may chuckle heartily from their stomach, but it still warms blessed heat rising upwards, like the swinging air balloon of some child and their neighbour's imagination, far above the stompings and miscellaneous howlings of life below.

Watson tries. Watson cares. Watson is. Holmes wonders when he stopped.

It is a warm day,

He thinks. When senses come and pass, sometimes they take the sensory ability with them. When one indulges in the arts for too long - when they let the chorus and course blast into their ears in an effort of stimulating overly - and it blasts their drums, and takes away some of their abilities to hear, to sense, to appreciate. It is warm, he thinks.

He simply no longer has the operations to truly tell.

His hands find the bow, and the bow its notes. He cannot tell if what he is hearing is coming from the instrument itself, or yet another ringing in his mind of blasted drums, of forsaken notes, voice and chorus.

It is not in its echoes but in its full form; it just is prone to constant repetition.

Sherlock plays, and he thinks it sounds sweet. He can no longer truly tell. Notes do not sound alike from each other but their meaning does. Each note, chord, be major or minor or fast or slow does not have that intention to it - the usually indelible flavour. It sounds correct, in the truly scientific sense, but whatever the first readers of Watson's overly celebratory notes may have drawn textually, he is not of a purely scientific mind, but whatever art may have been there-

The dish presaging clients lays empty. Has for some time, in fact. He can see the glint of it in the all-too thick rays. Silver and shone. Repelling sight, an agathakoloigic.

He finally hears the tune, and casts his mind and then sight back to the dish before.

Songs without words; the feeling without antecedent fact. Mendelssohn's Leider ohne Worte Op 67 no.2. He thinks it perhaps lies in the text - in the Study, Scarlet - on the table now behind him. His clothes do not hold the fancy necessary for so stirring and typically moving a piece, but - well, not even he can find a suitable explanation for not pulling oneself out of house clothes for six months, drab and grey as the skyline it backs upon usually is. Today, it is a comparable eyesore, but soft in a way that does not pull at the scabs at his inner arms the way the violin is currently.

Watson had asked him to play it for him. It is… touch, and sentiment, all combined. Soft in a way he should not be: is not. Stirring against a man all hard edges and deep seas below such cliff.

He clears the sky with a few fragile blinks.

The dish is not empty.

He paces towards it, and lifts the paper with thin fingers trembling against it from keeping the bow aloft within the same hand, lest it bash against the table and sprinkle sticky rosin on the good doctor's works and exam notes.

Would he be a good patient if he reads this?

He looks towards the window, and briefly questions why, before he registers the knock upon the building from down below, and, with hastened legs, sees the retreating dark form liable to have made such a noise.

He slides away his music sheets he cannot recall collecting, and fingers the sharp edges of thick paper in the form of calling card.

He opens… something. Something that still is. Something that may antecede something that is still thing, and not just the lasts dregs of some. He makes use of his early hyperlexia, to push against the encroaching edges of nothing, and examines what he considers may be less a prelude to ending, of amusement, than caesura of stimulant.

Chapter Text

It's been a while since things have appeared normal. Normality has always been a little subjective, especially for an army-man such as himself, but normal had become to mean anything grounded, particular, understandable. While the way and reasons men fought is and was always hard to parse, he had never much had the stomach for it, himself, at least there had been some sense of delineation to it - no that isn't quite the phrasing - damn his head and it's phrasing - but some order - a loose chord or thread with which to tie yourself to, to loop your finger round and round the link until it pulled on the snag that created it. A little unweaving to undo the knot you had found yourself in. This case… this case was as if you were given the chord and told to hang with it.

At least, that is how he tries - the way he can - rationalise it. It is a mission not meant for man - that damned spiral they attempted - where the weaving was not so much to undo the puzzle as to undo themselves. It is easy, he thinks, to imagine, say, a jumper, and imagine it in that form, and that is the way it was always meant to be, and, even if untangled, there must be some sort of cosmic confluence keeping it in that shape - the shape it was belonged to holding - and that there was some space in the universe where it was always indented, where even thread unwound would fall back into place, and the string hold some memory, and the knots rearrange themselves.
           What he has been finding, however, that a thread once pulled on, and a jumper unspooled, was just that: loose spool. That the predestined design was none so - that is was just a jumper merely because it happened on being a jumper, instead of being destined to be one. The whole thing being a rather elaborate mess, of course, to try and spell out the situation he is in, sorry as his fingers are in their attempt to explain it so cack-handedly and hackishly - it's as if his hands and tongue alike have been bandaged, that he itself is the jumper - the one unspooled. Well, not he, exactly, but him. He's finding that a person is much alike to some woven thing, in that aspect. That it may appear perfectly impermeable - fully formed, and beautiful, and present - and put there as if it is carved into the soil and rock itself, into brick and city, but some circumstance, extenuating, can pull at that thread - often only just a little more than it can bear - and you find that it was never meant to be that way at all, even if it was perfect at it. Even if it was the most glorious jumper in the world, very little is keeping it there, barring hope and besides knitting needles and knots.
           Very little is intrinsic, he finds. Very little is inseparable, he's found. And, at that, the human spirit, built on nothing but pulses and matter, if recent events are to be believed, is inwardly spiralling and intangible. Just a little soak in unforgiving waters can malshape it permanently, and tugging to hard, or the hacking with some, perhaps ritualistic, scissors and some improper tugging at the wrong places or the wrong times, or the right of both depending on one's perspective, can make it lost forever, as it was. He feels as if something very sacred has been taken from him with this knowledge. His religion as been some flailing thing, strongest in the depths of a warring Afghanistan, if that isn't enough to write off his piety then and there, but he feels as if it has somehow received some incurable crack, at this knowledge. He hangs on, there, just, but it does not feel the grounding rock it used to. He - his self - is no longer quite that rock. Been misshapen and malformed, from a dip in waters that should have been dark - should have been dark - but somehow, for just the briefest of seconds, he'd been allowed to see.

He is the malformed, but the unpicked is unbearable to see.

He thinks there might be very little left of his friend, Sherlock Holmes.

He, well, his patient, Sher- Holmes, is, well-

That is to say, none of it has been quite normal, and that is only accounting for the since, not the then.

The then is some painful thing balled in his chest, in whatever's left of-

Those horrible sights, the worse, the knowledge; the understanding-

Ground. Ground has been very hard to find these days. Normal has no longer really been a part of the equation. Something undefined. Something untranslatable. Unknowable.

Hopefully.

Hopefully, it all remains unknown. Even that second - god, that second - of understanding there, in the lighthouse, when his eyes connected with light unwavering even among the stench and miasma rising from the bodies, and the violence rising from the sea, and the sky coming down around their ears, he had heard, when his eyes connected just a little too long - connected -

He'd been jostled. Moved out of the way. Another soul staring with unstaring eyes - those dead, dead eyes he will always remember from Afghanistan - somehow so different to the medical studies - it was on a table it was understandable, it was understandable - death was different when you didn't witness it - and here he was, called, being called - bearing witness, calling, Holmes, Holmes is calling, Home -

And suddenly, he's in London again. It's a little past twelve o'clock, at the best of his understanding. Maybe one, or one-thirty. He'd lost his pocket watch at sea. That was all but all he had left of his brother. Now it's - it's gone now. It would be better if it were gone. If not, it'd be with that - that thing in the water.

There are no things in the water; there are no things in the water; their

Time back in London had been quite uneventful. He doesn't quite recognise his soul anymore, but that is okay, because he is back in London. That great boiling pot of all the best and worst the empire has to offer.

It is a perfect little place for them, perhaps: the lost and the great of London; those who have been broken by experience but

Hm. But?

Disregard previous statements. Sometimes it is best to see thought as a draft and the mind as one endless notebook - cross and tear where one sees fit.

God, it must be visible, mustn't it? He'd had no kith in England, but had come to acquire some, and was sure, sure, some it must have shown on his face, some twisting or abnormality, some difference, some godforsaken noticeable change, but none had noted on it. He'd checked the mirror, regularly - he'd put on some pounds, here and there, for the latency time and trouble had bought him - but, God's name, nothing had shown there.
           There must be something - a sign of what he'd been through, what he had gone through and changed and become - but, by the coming of Heavens to Earth, he'd found not a sign. His eyes are typical in shape, not bulged or elongated or vast with horrors, his neck, neither shrunk nor grown, his skin just as stretchy and elastic it had always been, not hanging down from his face or stretched thinly to the point of breaking over sharpness of bone or discoloured or pocked or tainted or twist-

Just, on Christ, normal.

No scarring. No unexplained wound that appears one day as if much is an elaborate hoax for this to poison him, as if it's set to kill him, as if this feeling is poison- it has to be poison or poison-like, this has to be sickness, but just… normal. As if none of this were real. As if it never really left an impact.

He told a slight lie - he has the right to; he's a writer - his eyes aren't quite the same.

Because it's not the same man staring through them.

It's as if the malshapen jumper has been stuffed inside the normal one, albe a few patches and nicks here and there, or really made to fit uncomfortably into the same space, with all anyone ever sees is the outward appearance, is the perfect presence of normality, while it is the malshapen rocking against it, railing at being meshed into the same space, uncomfortably, unnaturally, but with no release in which to free itself. And all anyone ever sees is the normal one, no hint of the other peeking just below the surface, no outward appearance of him being these two things at once - well, really one with an adequate cover. It is as if, now he knows he is being ridiculous, but this is just the best spelling of whatever word is yet unwritten, that he is not really John Watson anymore, not in the way he used to be.

There is no real core to us. The imprint of the jumper only exists for however long the jumper does in that form, and John no longer exists in that form, not in the same way. Whatever John is and has been is transient, and gone, and the fabric has reshaped itself. It is almost the same - it is the same pattern and threads - but it has become discoloured, lost some of it's dye and ink spots have formed, and it always sops, and the shape is no longer quite right; none of the same colour shining through, but, really, the issue is that the form isn't the same - enough to be passable- , but not quite

right,

He knows he's being superfluous, with all of this, but if one's head is not the best and most secure place to explore this, where is? His thoughts are entirely his own.

Is it the same? At times, he considers the ship of Theseus,

But it is very rarely explored that, if the boards remain the same, but are battered, and some replaced by themselves in other areas, and it suffers water damage and areas bloat and others are caused to be shrunken and malformed,

Well, what does it say if the ship cannot easily recognise itself? What does the ship have to say, if all of the parts remain there, there and thereabout, but its form is not only quite how it recognised it, if it's become a bit different - a bit too different

What if the ship is what it is, only in that moment? Only at that present time? If one ship walks in, and one walks out, and it still has its own constitute parts and it bears the same name, is it still-

Watson bears forms, and bears the weight of one's own. What happens when one outgrows it?

He's

Shopping. That's what he is - what he's doing, in that present moment. He's shopping-Watson. He's John with a list and John with a plan.

It's in his palm and that's where he is. It's a little sweaty around the edges - not with salt or richly sporous soul water reproducing itself again and again in an environment that never ends because its existence - because he's been out for a while, and in unfamiliar environments, he finds himself to be a disturbingly sweaty person.

Unfamiliar only to this newness. He's been at plenty just like these - from his pre-university studies in Edinburgh, whenever there's a department that's running a little low on funds, boards and professors alike begin to tighten their belts and their expenditures, or when little medical and surgical business go out the way of their namesake, then there's usually an outpour before the fiscal wound is stemmed: a jumble-sale. This can be very good if you are very foolish: eye failing surgeries and decide to start in the same business, or if you are the same kind of psychopath who enjoys collecting these items for whatever use he doesn't even want to know about - but luckily he's only addled enough to fall into the former.

He's been out of work for - God - how long is it now? Since before Sherlock - well-before… Ever since, God, it can't be Afghanistan? That makes almost three years now. The pension's coming through all-right, but it's hardly enough to sustain a man. He's incredibly thankful for wherever-the-hell it is Sherlock gets his (Lion's) share of the diggings' funds - not accounting for him, of course, not wanting to know exactly where for fear of it being the proverbial straw on the proverbial camel if it proves as tumultuous as the rest of the thin bits of information he shares of Sherlock's life - because he's got a rather meagre contribution.

The bookies hardly help, either, now that he is dwelling on it.

Back on point, his lack of occupation, if one discounts being the runner for Sherlock Holmes, is his precise reason for being here. He's not told Holmes a lot of it, which he truly wants to claim as an oversight, but is nothing but exactly intentional. He's… sincerely damaged. In truth, John has, a number of times, considered putting him into an institution - if only for his own health. He's considered brokering the topic with Mister Mycroft Holmes, but has the informed but suspicious feeling that such a conversation may end with an out-of-work doctor being discovered three days later, floating and punctured, on the banks of the Thames.
           Or, more likely, not found at all, even by the nominal Consulting Detective. Still, he does not truly know what to do. Mycroft has been no help - he does not wish to palm Sherlock off on anyone but he does not know how to help a man in this position cope. He has dealt, marginally, with the shaking of soldiers - one, in truth, and poorly - but he does not know what to do with another - he is not a doctor of the mind - and - and at least soldiers may return from war. The damage is healed when they are safe, and at home, where the mind can be explored in the absence of the cause - but one does one do when the war has followed them home? When the mind cannot be a retreat, because that is where the problem exists?

John does know of one method: finding an eccentric, bohemian man in central London and strong-arming him into sharing a flat. Unfortunately, not applicable for this subject.

How can one man be such a balm, yet an unescapable blunder?

No, that is not fair. Not if he is being truthful with himself. The patient - Sherlock - Holmes is not the blunder, so much as his primary physician is one of the worst. He simply cannot (cope?) cope(?) cope with Sherl - what Holmes needs. He is not the doctor - not used to be, never truly was, really. A student, and straight to a soldier. A veteran, in a few short years, and then, immediately, Holmes.

Is that an occupation? H- he doesn't know why it occurred to him as such. It's- odd. He's - he has been in a similar occupation to what he currently intends for years. He has been Holmes' live-in physician for a number of years, and a note-taker, and an unpublished biographer until he was a published biographer, and a - a friend - but he he can no longer afford to be. Holmes can't afford just a friend right now, he needs a proper physician - trained in such matters and without that personal element.
           He's attempted just that, to varying degrees for almost a half-year now, or it may be just such, and he's made so little progress, he feels as if he has not attempted anything at all. The medicine works, somewhat; he's lucid now, more lucid than he had been in - well, the beginning days - but he's not getting better. He's just… awake, somewhat. He still sleeps more than he wakes; he is difficult to rouse, except for when he's not, and all of this is jus so close to the surface - more often than not, when he looks into his friend's eyes, what he sees is not his friend, the patient, at all, but

that.

Sometimes he thinks his eyes are wrong: what is behind is John Watson, but not the John Watson he would have seen in August. The John Watson he's seen every month after. The thing is, with Sherlock, it's not that he sees Sherlock twisted by the water,

he doesn't see Sherlock at all.

The injection needles will need to be replaced, after all, September-Sherlock shoved a delivery's worth in the wall whilst soiling his bed with boot prints-

It's not all of the time, and it's not strictly often, it's

just so often.

That what he sees is something so other, so absent. A sky full of stars without the stars, but like you knew they were there, or are there, there's just some blotting

blotting out the light. It's… it's the reflection on the water that you can't really see the caster, and flat-water in a tidal storm, it's

The impression where the jumper used to be, where no impression should exist.

The footprint on a beach that has been empty for some time, and you begin to wonder why buoyant pressure nor lapping water has consumed the impression.

It's… he doesn't have the words. Again, his writing-mind has failed him. It's just so horrible.

He turns his hands back to is atten- his attention back his hands. He braces them on one of the tables so old and burdened with the sweaty fists of boys frantically scribbling medical notes that the wood has begun a very slow decay and begun to must, and he inhales the scent as if it will draw him back from the mess of untethered threads, and it does.

He's a medical man and a veteran, and he must act like it.

"Oh, John, my old boy, I've not seen you in donkey's years."

John twitches, and straightens to his full height. Not even the name they called him, those years back in the military, but he still stands to attention like they had.

"Warren? Why, old man, what're you doing here? I thought you took that position on the staff of- I want to say Norfolk?"

Time has bristled his 'stash, and brought the shine to his eyes that even drinks in the halls hadn't allowed for in the university days. It has extremely premature streaks of grey- or, so John thinks. He has to pause to remind himself that he's not in his early twenties anymore.

"You'd be correct there, good man. Yes, I am up in Norfolk County- did Jones tell you that? I could ask the same; last I've seen of you was all the way down in Bartholomew's. Did you stick around there after graduation, or have you taken a position in the city?"

"How do you know I'm not in practice here in Swindon?"

"I'm out here every other weekend. The school regularly buys more than they can use to sell it at a bit of a mark-up, but I know my way around a haggle," Warren says with a tone that John is still struggling to focus on, and a twitching eyelid, "I assume you're here for much the same reason?"

"Mh, and what reason is that?"

"I'm heading as the medical Superintendent. I'd send someone else out to do the busy-work, honest, but I don't trust my staff as far as I could throw them - and that's not Swindon. Not the sort of business you get into if everything is sound if you catch my intention. We handle a lot of, well, pretty powerful substances."

John draws back his head. Superintendent? He is only a year senior to John; that's… unnerving.

His lips feel a little stiff as he smiles.

"No, of course. I understand. It's hard to put complete trust in those under you."

"Underlings are easy to come by, and hard to shake, old boy. Be careful with those you let into your staff, or into your bed, so to say."

He winks, and, doing so, his eyelids catch together for just the briefest moment too long, like stuck with mortar.

"Yes," he annunciates. "I do imagine that that's rather… difficult."

"You know, I- Have you ever been up to Norfolk, doctor?"

"No I - er - I can't say I have. But my - my companion has, in his youth." He neglects to say his companion is still very much in his youth, despite what present events seem to be assuming of him.

"Great bloody place. Great and huge - as soon as you step out of the City, John, just as soon as you pass beyond the borders of Norwich: plains like you wouldn't believe. Spreading out, grass thin and spindly and sharp as anything up to your knees, especially the more your roving legs wander t'ward the coast. The salt water can steal your lungs, John, and it's some of the clearest you'll see. It won't always be like that, you know, the more factories they put up there. But, at the moment, if you visit in this second, castles and ruins can speak your every movement, for they've seen much, and they'll have much more to see.
           "Those skeletons have seen more monarchs pass over this country than you or I will ever have time to dwell on, and the howling, doctor, the howling and huffing and chuffing coming from the creatures of the sea, when you're alone and freezing your fingers and toes off on the beach as you slowly lose your ankles to the grey sand- not one you'll ever forget. Some days, doctor, some days, when I've had chance to speak to a sailor as they come off patrol or carry in their load, say that on their bobbing boats all but tied to the coast, they can even see the shadowy coast of Norway, lying there, desolate, in the distance."

John feels like the story about some little ceremonial county up North shouldn't have been quite so harrowing, but is all the same.

Waiting for Dr Scott to clarify himself does nothing.

"Does-"

"This is all to say, John, that I read widely."

Quiet. "Sorry?"

"You heard what I said; come, John, this isn't an overly packed sale."

"Sorry, what is you you-"

"Editorials; thought-pieces, all sorts of material, doctor. Magazines," he says so jovially, but there is something else written on his face.

"Sorry, is there a meaning to this-?"

"Do you know what sort of hospitals we have to the east, in Norfolk, doctor?"

"Why, I'd imagine all sorts-"

"Fresh air, you see. The health benefits of the seaside- it's why we have a specially designed tuberculosis hospital, sanitoriums and all that. Really advanced progress since that Prussian, sorry, German Koch made that discovery early last year- all scrambling to integrate that research. I considered that briefly, but we didn't know much about tuberculosis at the time, I'm sure you know, and we don't have many weapons against it yet- I'm sure you'll know, as a city doctor - before I set up practice where I'm working currently. I could have gone for the tuberculosis sanitorium, Mundesley, or to the Norfolk and Norwich hospital, but that's not where I'm employed, doctor. I'm in Norfolk country, in Thorpe St Andrew. I trust you know of this institution."

John feels a little cold. He doesn't know why.

"I fear I'm in the- I do not. Please enlighte- tell me, Scott."

"Well, before I was director, I was a hygienist - after we finished post-graduate study - working with, ah, mental faculties."

"It's-"

"Not many doctors are quite familiar with mental asylums, Watson, the fear of it, see. It's… warranted, you see. Just something I… thought to bring up in conversation."

John's lips feel a little too numb to properly form his words, even if his thoughts allowed for any.

"Well, and the fact that I hope you find a good woman, doctor. I know many of our former classmates are rooting for you, in that department. And, that we hope the practice set-up goes along well."

"How-?"

"Well, I've got all I came for. New speculums, and…" he pats his bags and pockets, "the restraints. I'll be off, if that is of no trouble, doctor."

"Well- wai-"

"À tout à l'heure (See you later), good doctor." And, he is gone.

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