holmes_minor | Fic: Lachrymosa: G

Title: Lachrymosa
Rating: Gen
Length: 412
Content Notes: Set during the hiatus, post-Mary's death; grief; angst; POV Watson
Summary: Watson receives a gift from a patient.
Author's Note: Not written for any prompt, just an idea that's been perculoating for a while. Inspired by this post on Tumblr of Victorian lachrymosas (tear-catchers).

I weighed the glass vial in my hand.

It was heavier than it had seemed from across the room.

And more beautiful.

Here I could see the delicate etchings which intertwined with the gold; together they gave the appearance of fine embroidery
work.

It had caught my eye soon after I’d entered the room and my gaze must have lingered a moment too long, for the old man had said, “My late wife liked pretty things, unusual things. She collected them. Lachrymosas. The top allows the tears to evaporate and thus, herald the end of the time of mourning. Here,” he rose and walked to the shelf, “if you like it, accept it as a token of my gratitude, Doctor.”

I refused.

“Please,” he insisted. “It shan’t remain.”

No, I could see his point there. Ours was a final consultation at his home. I was, in a few moments, to pronounce him fit enough to wed his bride and take her on a lengthy voyage abroad. One would hardly expect the new wife to cherish the baubles of the old.

I politely refused his offer once more and had thought that the end of it, but at a moment when my back was turned, the wily, stubborn old fellow must have snuck it into my Gladstone, wrapped in a handkerchief.

Lachrymosa.

Tear-catcher.

Beautiful, but wrong for me, for there had not been any tears.

Not for Holmes.

I had been too shocked and stricken, to numbed by heavy guilt and sudden grief, to cry for him. And there was no grave, no memorial, no place where I could spend my tears, lay a flower or say a prayer, save an address on a street that I purposefully avoided these days.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there had been no tears for Mary.

I had been too fatigued. It had been more than three hundred days of being nurse and doctor, housemaid and priest, more than three hundred days of watching the woman I loved turn, moment by moment, into the patient I tended. After the funeral, I slept. And when I woke, I screamed into the silence of our home, which swallowed and echoed my rage like a Swiss waterfall.

No tears to catch. They were all inside me. I was the lachrymosa.

But my mourning would never end, not even if every unshed tear within me evaporated.

I hurled the vial against the wall, and it splintered into a cascade of weeping shards.