Work Text:
221B Baker Street has been around for a long time. The brick building of Victoria’s reign, splattered with mud from the streets, with a chipping black lamp-post and a worn golden address sign is almost tangible. The cries of vendors and beggars ring out from the streets, the relentless rattle of carriages and idle chatter combining in a city symphony.
The flat is well-lit, small but comfortable, with three chairs and a sprawling fireplace. Books are littered everywhere; the ones that couldn’t fit in the shelf are stacked on tables and stairs and the floor. An equally large amount of miscellaneous papers clutter the room, notebooks and ink placed neatly on a small desk in the corner. The broad window allows just the right amount of lazy sunlight to filter through, illuminating the stranger details of the place – such as, the bullet holes pockmarking the wall, or the skull on the mantle, or the knife laden with mail driven into a nearby surface. The room bears traces of the men who inhabit it: the one is observable in the neat surgeon’s kit in the room upstairs, the ink stains on sturdy wood, an old edition of Great Expectations on the side table; the other, in the tobacco slipped ungracefully in a Persian slipper, the precarious stack of chemistry equipment next to the window, the violin leaning up against a collection of newspaper clippings strung together.
221B Baker Street has never existed. A phantom address, hovering somewhere between fiction and reality, yet written down in history as a haven for the downtrodden, solace for the unlucky, and last chance for the forgotten. The building itself almost breathes; every memory, every desperate plea, every loss and success, making up its very foundation. It has the feeling of a hazy memory, hovering just at the edge of your consciousness. Always there.