Work Text:
Sherlock Holmes took in all of the activity of the neighborhood as his mind considered all the puzzles to lay before Joan. He refused to consider the pickpocket across the street, the man practicing the lies he would tell his wife standing four doors down-he could already tell the wife knew, nor the street vendor who did not realize that it would soon be raining on his paper stock.
He took enough notice to avoid the bird who would have defecated on him. Whatever others might say, that was only good luck for his dry cleaner.
His thoughts focused on Joan’s training plan. They would take months, no years, to go through all of them together. If he thought of what he felt as these thoughts zipped though his mind, he would have refused to have acknowledged 'pleasure’ and immediately label it something else. The satisfaction of a master with an able student would have been first.
That he had not identified any thought of pleasure was a very good thing.
He made it four quiet steps into the foyer, before his world tilted.
It was the voice.
The dead now haunted his house.
Oddly, the voice was not speaking to him. About him and in the third person, yes; but not to him.
Even at his worst, when he could not inject the drugs into his arm, swallow pills, or snort his way to nasal cartilage loss fast enough, thinking he would go mad before the effects could overtake him and he could escape….this had never happened.
“Irene said her life truly began when she met Sherlock Holmes. She never felt more alive than when she could see what he would see…. “
Rooted to the spot, he did not see anything for moment. Perhaps just a hallucination?
“We had to observe. Our home life was such that it was a matter of survival. Still he exceeded anything that she could even conceive of.”
The voice was proud of him, as she had been when he was particularly good. The voice knew Irene’s truth.
“I know nothing about…” Watson was entertaining the voice. The voice was real, and Watson felt safe enough to ‘share.’
Irene had a sister.
No one could have that voice.
The two thoughts warred with each other. The sister had never reached out to him. Never.
He had never reached out, but after he saw the pool of blood…and failed to find Irene’s killer…he was preoccupied with being the clutches of his demons and his father. The sentiment to reach out to a not beloved older sister was not in his grasp.
He corrected himself-Irene’s presumed killer.
Knowledge had always been power. The knowledge of this......All he had thought, all he had done, all had been…false.
The sister who was supposed to meet him. Soon, Irene had said, for it was to be a surprize. He knew that he was not to know when he had overheard her on the phone, so he had said nothing.
Irene’s sister was to visit, but did not.
No one could have that voice.
It all came together as he stood in the hall.
Irene’s body had never been found, as with so many victims had never been found. Everyone knew what had happened. Sherlock had vividly seen her death regardless of the fact he had not been there. He had seen her fight and never beg. He saw this whether his eyes were opened or closed, and it drove him to and from the work at the same time.
Curious phenomenon, that.
The sister had been notified. They were not close, there had been a delay.
The sister had been out of town.
The sister had been in London.
Irene had fled; had not trusted him to protect her.
She had taken her sister’s life.
Well not that way, just the house, credit cards, and checks (retirement, trust, and residual, if he recalled properly) that her much older sister received.
He briefly wondered about the sister’s cats.
“I have been traveling for awhile, and since I was in New York, I wanted…to see him. Meet him.”
Irene would find them good homes.
The voice was relaxed, friendly, integrating without trying. Vibrant. Alive. M. had not found her. She did not need his help to survive.