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Water, Sherlock Holmes hypothesises, has borne witness to all his blackest moments.
He will look down sometimes to find an icy flood up to his knees, rising steadily till it threatens to swallow him whole. This is his mind’s way of telling him, you are powerless. He can only stand and watch and suffocate as something he holds dear is ripped apart by churning tide.
Or sometimes it will appear as a dim blue glow on his skin, strings of light moving across his hands and arms like twisting arteries. The shadow of a shark may move overhead and throw him into darkness. When it pulls away, there might be blood drying on his fingers.
No water can wash it off.
-
She is living now in a villa on the edge of the countryside. Italy suits her. Distance suits her. It feels wrong now to conjure the image of her lips and ink black hair in his head without first reminding himself just how far away the real thing actually is.
You don’t deserve to have her close by, a part of his mind tells him. But that thought is always pushed away as soon as her hands touch his.
He must remember to ask her how she manages not to drown under the wash of her own unwanted memories. Or perhaps she hasn’t learned to yet herself. Maybe like him her storms are silenced only by the distraction of a new puzzle or the heated press of his open mouth to her neck.
Or maybe that’s wishful thinking. He wants - more than anything - to be for her what she is for him.
At that thought he pulls away from her lips. His head lying against the white sheet, he stares at her and she gazes back. His breaths are heavy and deep.
“Coming up for air?” she says, uncharacteristically kind. Her hand is curled into his hair and she runs her thumb gently over his temple. It is more than he can bear.
-
Irene does not like the dark. When she can, she will throw open every window, pull back every heavy curtain, letting the light flood onto her bed and render them both incapable of concealing anything from the other. He is reminded of the Belgravia room that he keeps quiet and untouched in his mind. There, the sun had covered everything.
Darkness, she insists, is too much like being underwater.
-
What would Victor have been like, the walls of his home sometimes ask him, had he fully grown?
What would you have been like, the voice might continue, had you not hidden your deepest fears in murky waters? A greater man? A better one? Would you have saved more lives?
There is no point in asking about what could have been, he wants to answer, when there’s so much to be done about what is. His sister is fighting her own war now, but the sound of his violin at least soothes her battle wounds.
She will look at him sometimes, like she’s about to ask a question. He knows the question is why don’t you ever talk about her. It’s possible she already knows the answer is I can’t.
-
Irene had shown him a childhood photograph once. On one of her ill-advised secret trips back into Britain she traveled to her hometown and rooted around the abandoned house of her deceased parents. This was one of the things she had uncovered. Whatever else she’d taken from there, Sherlock never found out.
It is a snapshot of her, ten years old, at the bay. Her hair is still curly and cropped short, and she’s wearing a yellow summer dress. She’s holding her own clunky point-and-shoot camera in her hands. There is a trace of a smile in the shadow that’s meant to be her mouth, but her round eyes are pointed to something off to the side, as if she’d been distracted.
It was taken “before anything had happened,” she tells him. He wonders how deep the truth of that sentence runs. How much of the Irene Adler he knows is already present in this sun-dappled girl? How little of her is left in the Woman who sits across him in this kitchen in the Umbria countryside?
In the picture, the sea beyond the bay looks like nothing but a vast, distant mirror of the sky. Yet its horizon rises far above young Irene’s head, as if hovering behind her, waiting.
He won’t ask her any more questions. Irene Adler does not like to dwell on the past. Irene Adler never lingers, save for when she stills her fingertips over his chest when she thinks he is asleep.
-
“Is it safe here?” he asks her whenever she moves, and he comes to meet her – be it in a cramped apartment in an Asian capital city or (his favorite so far) a creaking watchtower in a wintery Russian forest.
“Of course.” She always makes that devilish smile he can never quite recreate in his memory. “I’m safe wherever I go.”
(Except in his nightmares, it seems.
Well, “nightmare” is a euphemism. He’s never been keen to seek out if there is another name for the hallucinations one experiences in a cocaine crash.
She’ll be standing at the end of a waterfall, much like how he sometimes imagines himself. Her back will be turned to him. A bleak, almost cold sunlight outlines her from behind.
Slowly she’ll lean forward, until she’s just about to tip over the edge of the rock, and only then does Sherlock’s body allow him to propel forward – No, he’ll shout, and grab her by the wrist.
He’s always able to stop her right before she falls. She still doesn’t turn to face him, she never does. But he’ll wrap his arms around her and press her body into his, keeping her from the edge, his heart thudding painfully against her back. They’ll be soaking wet, and the roar of the waterfall blocks out the sound of him breathing harshly into her ear.
He will wake up in a hospital bed, being watched over by a frowning John Watson, and she will be miles away.)
-
On his last night there in her home in the Italian countryside, when the sky is dimmed with storm clouds, he tells her the story.
“It happened in an aquarium,” is all he’s said, and already a veil falls over Irene’s face. He sees what she sees – a claustrophobic tunnel, a tube of glass weighed down on by gallons of dark water. Only way out is to push forward.
He takes her hand, in a way no one else in the world will ever see, and becomes her anchor.
He tells her how he was at the very end of the puzzle, triumphantly pushing the last pieces into place. How he was not being swept away by the wave, but riding it.
He tells her how he’d let himself forget that there were people who depended on him, and people he depended on, for the sake of chasing that high. For the sake of feeling like Sherlock Holmes again.
He tells her how Mary Watson –
How Mary Watson –
Without his willing it, the veins on the back of his hand glow dim blue, like the reflections of light off the glass of an aquarium. They shift and twist, and he feels wet blood coat his fingers.
Perhaps there are empty spaces in his life meant to be filled with water. Perhaps he is meant to have these cracks blooming across the stone so that the flood can gush through. All the heartbreaks in his life are self-inflicted, and the icy water, that he thinks is there taunt him, is merely a natural result of gravity –
Warm hands, a sharp contrast from the cold room, touch his face.
He has crumpled over without realizing it, and he rests his brow against the shoulder of the Woman, whose soft hum drowns out the sound of churning waves and gunshots.
How can he be for her what she is for him, he mourns, when he can barely hold up the weight of his own guilt?
He wants to open his mouth and blurt it, ask her why she chooses to stay (rather, let him stay), when it hurts to think of all he could have given her and has not. Even in his nightmares, he only saves her just a second before it’s too late. Who’s to say reality will be as merciful?
But no breath fills his lungs, no voice reaches his lips. Irene has threaded her fingers into his hair, and her other hand strokes the length of his back. Maybe she knows he wants to ask all these questions. Maybe she hopes he realizes her answer is it doesn’t matter.
He brings up his own unsteady hands to grasp at the ends of her long, loose hair, and she gathers him in tighter, as if catching him from the edge of the waterfall, as if saying, I’ve got you.
And she has. My god, Sherlock thinks, she really has.