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Enola watched Sherlock carefully. Despite her brother being both two decades older than her and about double her size he looked impossibly small in the chair Watson had deposited him in. After he’d been checked out by the doctor the two had had a long conversation Enola had been sent out for. Eventually, Watson had left the tent with a disappointed and worried expression and given instructions to Enola. She was assigned to watch her brother as he had a new concussion he could or would not tell them the origin of and consequently was not allowed to sleep until nightfall.
Sherlock’s eyes were sunken in, his hair still a mess of dark curls, dried blood and dust. When his eyes had been shut for a little too long for her comfort, Enola lightly kicked his shin. He flinched so hard his chair almost fell over with him in it. She looked at him questioningly, but he just shook his head.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, rubbing a hand over his face. Enola did not like this version of her usually so stoic sibling. She’d seen him in all kinds of states, but this was a new low.
“I’ve been thinking,” perhaps her talking would keep him awake.
He made a non-committal noise and settled back into his chair.
“You once told me ‘a Holmes never disappears without leaving clues for another Holmes’,” she made a poor impression of him in an attempt to make him laugh but it flew right over his head; instead, he just waited for her to continue.
“But when we searched your room we only found the clues Moriarty had left for us to find. Nothing from you.”
For a split second she could see an emotion she was not familiar with on his face. He cleared his throat, “I left you the notebook.”
“No, that was not on purpose. That was just left behind there.”
He glanced at her with half-lidded eyes, then went back to staring at the tent’s ceiling. When the silence stretched for over a minute Enola spoke up again.
“Did you not want me to find you?”
“No!” he sat up to look at her, his mouth opened as if he were going to speak but then he decided otherwise.
“Then tell me the true reason.”
He directed his gaze to the ground now instead. After a moment he had finally decided on what to say, “I did not want you to think I had been kidnapped. I did not want you to worry – that would be worse to me than you thinking I was being rude by leaving on purpose.”
She sighed. Was he really this much of an imbecile? Her intelligent, caring, observant brother was usually so much smarter than that.
“Did you not think it would worry me less if you had somehow communicated that? That I would be less worried if you had left me something to say, ‘I am leaving because I am sick of these people’? You are not normally this… uncalculated.”
He fiddled with a loose thread of his dirtied, torn shirt.
“I…”
Enola shook her head, “Sherlock, I cannot believe this! How could you be so foolish!” she was halfway to shouting at him at length for being so careless, truly there was nothing she’d rather do, but she calmed herself again. He was obviously not in his right mind – and had not been for quite some time judging by his behavior the last weeks. She’d have to hold back on him until he was well enough to take a verbal beat down. Right now, he looked as if he might disintegrate if she continued.
The Holmeses were not a very emotionally involved family, mostly all members kept to themselves but in this particular moment it was necessary to overstep a little. Enola was not good at this. But she had to know what was going on with him and how to fix it. “…are you alright?”, she asked.
Immediately the room’s mood changed. Sherlock froze. Enola swallowed, this had been a mistake. Regardless of how close they had grown in the past years they were still not anywhere near asking such weighted questions directly.
“Haven’t gotten much sleep the last weeks,” he responded resignedly, almost too quietly for her to hear, “I suppose… I suppose I have not…,” after that he trailed off and silence filled the room again.
It shocked her a little. Not the answer’s content – though that was concerning in its own right – more so that he’d given her one at all. Perhaps the concussion and sleep deprivation were working in her favor. He grew quiet again and Enola gathered her thoughts.
“I noticed,” she said. And she had. Her brother had always been a tired man for as long as she’d known him – really known him. He was always exhausted from work or life, and a good balance between those two did not run in their family. But the last weeks had been different. On several occasions it had taken longer than she would have liked to get his attention, then to get a reaction at all. Not only when she called on him but even in face-to-face conversations he had seemed… absent.
“I will ask Watson if you are allowed to get some rest a little sooner than in five hours, then.”
His eyes grew wide, “No, please, he’s already spent too much time on me. I am fine, truly, Lady Tewkesbury needs his attention much more than I do.”
“It will only take a moment, stay put, don’t close your eyes for too long, and, pray, don’t do anything stupid,” she hopped from the table she had been sat on and left the tent. The sun was beating down on the camp leaving people to flee into the shadows of trees or tents with their canvas walls pulled to the side. She found the doctor and her future mother-in-law easily.
“Doctor Watson? It’s Enola, Sherlock’s alright, I just have a question,” she called.
“Come in, love, I will be right with you,” it came from behind the closed flap.
The small space housed some chests that had been saved from the fire, a table the doctor was leaned over, writing something in his notebook, and a cot the Lady Tewkesbury was lying on, her tired eyes meeting Enola’s when she entered.
“Hello, dear,” the woman greeted her with a hoarse voice. She looked bad but was luckily not in any threatening condition. Enola sat on the cot by her side and took her hand. The two shared a quiet conversation until the doctor stood up straight and wiped his hands on a towel, “What did you need again, love?”
“I wanted to ask if Sherlock may sleep a little sooner than what you prescribed. He’s exhausted,” she explained, giving him a look that hopefully conveyed that the latter was an issue they would have to address some other time as well.
The doctor sighed, “I wish I could tell you yes, however, without knowing how and when he got the concussion I’d rather he stay awake for a little while longer.”
Lady Tewkesbury cleared her throat (a noise so unpleasant it made all people in the room wince), “Moriarty – she hit his head against the wall this morning.”
Watson and Enola shared a look.
“Was he behaving strangely after?” the doctor questioned, turning back a page in his notebook.
“I believe he may have passed out for a brief moment… afterwards he was a little dazed, asked me the same question twice within half an hour.”
Watson nodded, “Yes, that must have been it. Thank you, madame.”
She smiled sadly, “She would not let him sleep either. Came in every hour at night to wake him. The first night I believed her when she said it was because he’d been hit over the head harder than had been appropriate when they had taken him, but the second and third just seemed like she enjoyed it.”
----
Enola and Watson both hurried the short way back to the tent Sherlock was in, returning to him walking around the room unsteadily. The doctor was by his side in an instant, gently forcing his trouble patient to sit on the unused cot in the back of the space, all the while the taller of the pair protested vehemently, mumbling something about having to ‘get a grip again’.
“Sherlock, dear, calm yourself, you are alright,” Watson whispered as he inspected a new scrape on the other’s hand. Enola pulled up a chair next to the cot for Watson to sit in; having to kneel would not do his leg any good. The man shot her a grateful look and returned his attention to the slightly distraught Sherlock before him.
“Dear, can you look at me a moment,” Watson hummed. He inspected his friend’s eyes and then moved on to gently search the back of his head. He cringed when he found what he’d been hoping not to find.
“Lady Tewkesbury was right,” he sat down again, “Sherlock, dear, do you remember how you hurt your head?”
The detective frowned, “No, I don’t. I’m fine.”
“The Lady Tewkesbury told us Moriarty may have forced that big your head against the wall, do you remember that?” Watson continued, already knowing the answer would be the same, which he was confirmed in a moment later.
“Do you remember her keeping you from sleeping?”
That Sherlock looked less certain about, “Possibly…? She said I had a concussion.”
“You probably did, love, but she forced you to stay awake longer than would have been necessary, hm? And now you’ve got a new concussion on top of the older one.”
Actual tears glistened in Sherlock’s eyes as he buried his head in his hands, “I’m- I’m so tired, John-,“ his whispering was cut off by a choked sound that reminded Enola far too much of an entrapped animal.
Watson laid a comforting hand on his friend’s shoulder, “And that is why you should sleep now. Don’t worry, we will not let anything happen to you either through external or internal causes.”
It took at most twenty seconds until Sherlock was lying down on the thin mattress and already fast asleep. Watson leaned back in his chair and sighed heavily. Enola, who had watched the scene play out in front of her quietly, feeling a little useless (and more like a third wheel than she would ever want to confront) nudged his shoulder and looked at him expectantly.
“I could not keep him awake for longer,” he said, running his fingers through his hair, “Sometimes you have to go against what you have been taught. Sleep deprivation would prolong the symptoms of the concussion too much for me to justify ignoring it in favor of the other.”
Enola raised her eyebrows, “And now?”
“And now we try to keep him stable and alive until he either wakes up on his own or we cannot in good conscience let him sleep any longer.”
She would continue to watch him, of course. She hadn’t freed him to let him out of her sight for the foreseeable future after all.
“Something concerns me about this still,” Watson broke the silence, “I could not tell you what, but he seems… shaken up. She must’ve really gotten to him.”
Enola glanced at her brother’s sleeping form. The doctor was right, as always; Sherlock did seem more affected by the events of the last few days than she would have anticipated.
A few things have to be considered when one makes such a statement, primarily that Sherlock Holmes was a chronically unimpressed individual. Enola had seen him get shot, stabbed and punched, had met him the morning after he’d been drugged, kidnapped or tortured without suspecting a thing of it from his demeanor, and had witnessed him react with but a curt hum to violent deaths and otherwise horrid circumstances. To see this man be reduced to such a mess after what he’d usually call “a rather bothersome but otherwise uneventful weekend” – concussion and sleep deprivation aside – was indeed concerning.
Ultimately, however, they could do nothing to get to the bottom of this mystery with their subject currently resembling a calmly breathing boulder more than a man. They’d have to wait until their master detective was at least up and had had some soup to start poking him with questions.
In the meantime, Enola and Watson silently played cards together on the small, round coffee table that had stood collecting dust under the larger desk, both turning the issue in their minds. They would figure it out, whatever it was. They were together, after all; two detective siblings and the brilliant doctor that kept them both alive. There was no case they could not solve, even if it was one of their own.