Holmes Minor

Title: Journey’s End
Author: gardnerhill
Form/Wordcount: 200 – 100 – 55 – 6 story reduction.
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes; John Watson; Sebastian Moran.
Rating: G
Warnings/Content: Implied violence; suicide ideation.
Author’s Notes: For both May prompts, “A journey to 221b” and the 200 – 100 – 55 – 6 story reduction format.

***

Sherlock Holmes made himself watch every moment of Watson's terrified cries of his name, discovery of his note, horror of realisation, and howling grief across the chasm that divided them. He himself had voluntarily chosen to descend into Hell to combat a legion of the Professor’s faceless demons, but had dragged the best man in London into the first circle with him. This was his just punishment.

That remained the worst moment of his 3-year exile. The night-long torture session at Nilsson’s hands, the fever that wracked him in Addis Ababa, the seventeen hours of pacing on a Nepal mountainside so he would not freeze to death, never pierced his heart as did that penance.

One by one he found the spider’s threads and snapped them, with either a clink of the cuffs or a hand over the mouth and a blade across the carotid.

Florence. Lhasa. Morocco. France. Three sweltering Christmas Days among non-celebrants. Three sets of seasons alone, summer to spring. Three years of constant movement, always just one step behind the tiger.

Then his prey’s slip, in the tragic fate of the Honourable Ronald Adair. Blessing the young peer and his untimely death, Holmes flew to London.

***

I survived. I walked and breathed and sometimes even ate and slept. I tended patients and went home.

I stopped self-castigation – You left him when he needed you most, you have failed your duty – because I came close to putting a bullet in my head one night. From then on I simply did not think beyond the day’s work.

Hours, days, weeks, months. Three cheerless Christmases in grey slush and yellow fog.

Then a death in a locked room, an impossible bullet shot, that pricked at my sense of mystery. I lifted my head, and went to the crime scene.

***

He’d slipped up, the sentimental fool. Couldn’t stay away from home. And I couldn’t miss from here.

The fool I. He’d baited the trap with himself. And both waited to snare me.

Professor, you and your damnable English-gentleman rules! One shot at Reichenbach would have saved us! Why did you say “Don’t kill the doctor”?

***

221b, unchanged. Two broken hearts, mended.