Chapter Text
At that minute, Sherlock Holmes was thirty years, four months, twenty-nine days, five hours and thirty-six minutes old. In that he was wrestling one James Moriarty, there was the distinct possibility of not growing an hour older. A matter of life and death. The culmination of a life’s work, that minute.
Sherlock had let his faithful Doctor go with a mad grin and a quick wink. He had walked with impatient steps to this spot where Moriarty waited. To this. For this. Arms wrapped around each other and fast pulled breaths as hands grappled for a better hold. Pushed and grunted and shoved and ultimately, this was a matter of death. As Moriarty tumbled back, arm-in-arm they went over the edge of Reichenbach falls.
As he fell, Sherlock Holmes thought:
1. Mathematically. The rate of their decent. v = v0 + a*t.
2. Logically. The types of injuries that they would sustain and the way in which those injuries would present upon their corpses. He reflected that it was a pity that he would not have the opportunity to examine their remains.
3. Thematically. The look Watson’s face would take when he realized the ruse. The way Watson’s voice would echo and fade on the rocks as he called and heard no answer.
The hard smack of water was a revelation. For a moment. Then that mighty consciousness went dark.
However, unexpected as it might have been in the considerable experience of both Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty, it turned out that in certain circumstances, death had a grace period.
Not that Sherlock Holmes was to know that in the short term. Because to all intents and purposes and actualities, he was dead. The blunt blow of water drove the air from his lungs and left him only with water for breath. Since humans, and Sherlock was in this regard quite human, need air to breath, a lack of that air paired with unconsciousness rendered him quite dead. Also, sad as it is to report, his was not a particularly interesting corpse, since being dead was practically the only thing wrong with him.
Professor Moriarty, whose sole focus during the fall had been to position their spinning forms such that Sherlock's body took the blunt force trauma of the fall (v = v0 + a*t and p + 1/2pV(2) + pgh = constant and A(1)V(1) = A(2)V(2) and p(e) + 1/2pV(2)(e) = p(0) and C(p) = p-p(e)/ 1/2pV(2)(e)) was less dead and more alive. He was in fact on top while Sherlock was on the bottom.
After Moriarty emerged from the depths, he laughed in triumph. It wasn’t the culmination of a life’s work. That would involve coils and threads and control. Still, he pulled Sherlock's body from the water with a wet inert thump to the shore. He laughed and he grinned and he crouched like a spider over the dead body. He hardly noticed young Adelheid as she abandoned her duties guarding her goats and with an unthinking hand touched Sherlock's face. Of course, for a mind such as Moriarty’s hardly was not the same as not at all.
A tiny spark crackled under her fingers. Sherlock coughed out water in a sudden exhale. Breathed in air and was very much alive.
Unthinking, because while young Adelheid was neither intellectually, spiritually or physically special, she was nevertheless special. Heretofore, she had only used her specialness to bring her goats back to life and thus doomed numerous scamper-no-more deer. Nevertheless, her touch worked much the same for the world’s only consulting detective.
Unthinking, because life had a price. Sixty seconds worth. In that young Adelheid was neither intellectually or spiritually special, she pulled back her unthinking hand and cradled it against her chest. She glanced back and forth between the two men and was entirely uncertain what she should do next.
Professor James Moriarty, who it must be admitted was not at his best having fallen over a rather high waterfall, lost twelve critical seconds staring at the not-dead Sherlock.
Sherlock Holmes, who it must be admitted was also not at his best given that he had fallen over a rather high waterfall and died, spent twelve critical seconds looking up at the sky. The color of which was precisely nine degrees brighter and more colorful than before he died. In fact, every color was richer. Saturated. The roar of the water of greater intensity. The taste of the water more rank. The smell of the crushed moss beneath him deeper. The feel of the stones sharper. It was like being himself, only nine times more so, which for most people would be a blessing. To be more. Since Sherlock Holmes had always been rather a lot, this was a bit much.
Twelve seconds. He looked up and Moriarty looked down. Moriarty, who knew a dead body when he heaved it, grinned. He said, “Wonderful. Now I can kill you again.” He sneered at Adelheid. “I’ll kill him and you’ll bring him back. Over and over, because I win!”
If Adelheid had spoken English, she might have told him that it didn’t work that way. But she didn’t speak a word of English. She shrank back at Moriarty’s tone. The sidelong serpentine movement of his head. The way he crouched. Licked his lips in sudden darts of tongue. Thirty-two seconds.
Sherlock rolled and tumbled Moriarty to the ground and they were at it again. Top and bottom and rolling in the soft sucking sand next to the pool. The waterfall fell on.
Adelheid thought the not-dead man was beautiful and likely to be grateful to her, and being thirteen was much swayed by this thought. She also thought that the other man was mean and angry and not nice at all, and being thirteen was equally swayed by that thought. She held her unthinking hand to her heart pounding chest. Forty-nine seconds.
They tumbled towards her. She stepped out of the way. Sixty seconds and the choice was made. A flash of light and Moriarty went grey. Sherlock let go and Moriarty’s body fell still with a squelch on the damp earth. Uninteresting and not much wrong with him, but for the fact that Professor James Moriarty was quite dead.
The waterfall roared on. Sherlock yelled over the din, but he lacked the German and Adelheid utterly lacked the English to explain.
But she did what she could. She’d been thinking and planning how to explain this for years. Her whole short life. The culmination of a life. Well, she was just thirteen and these things are all relativistic. She picked up a brown leaf and placed it next to a flower. At her touch, the leaf turned glossy green. Sixty seconds later, one minute in fact, the flower wilted. Adelheid touched the leaf again. It went brown at her touch. She looked at Sherlock and expressively raised her eyebrows, rolled her eyes, pursed her lips, waved her hands, and did everything but a country dance.
Sherlock, who was by no definition in any dictionary that ever has or ever shall be written slow in comprehension, sighed. For it seemed that in the end, Professor James Moriarty had been defeated by a thirteen year old goat herding girl with dark curls and a gift for mute comedy.
He sighed and became distracted by the sensation of that sigh. Which really would not do at all. Especially, as from above, he heard Watson’s voice call the syllables of his name. “Holmes! Where are you Holmes! Answer me. Holmes!” Sherlock shivered. It was the cold. He was wet. He’d been dead. That was it entirely.
He looked at the ground where the toss and turn of the earth spoke encyclopedias of what had occurred and it would take an utter imbecile not to comprehend. Sherlock with a high appreciation of the imbecility of his fellow man and the impossibility of facing Watson in this moment, left Adelheid with the corpse and went away for what may be referred to as the Great Sulk.
Of Sherlock’s eventual return to 221B Baker Street, much has already been written. None of it featured the minute changes in color in Watson’s face as he saw Sherlock returned from the dead. None of it mentioned the ever patient flutter of Watson’s eyelids as he heard the words and drank them in. It was implied how he forgave any and every trespass.
How Watson came to once more sit across from Holmes in their accustomed chairs. The toes of their slippered feet exactly three inches apart as the coal fire hissed in the narrow grate.
Sherlock heard the hiss and thought:
1. There is a potential experiment in the decay rate of coal tar extract. Watson cannot possibly object. It would be for science.
2. Watson twitched his foot every three point five seconds. He was remembering the musical performance that they had heard the previous evening.
3. Sherlock could slip off his slipper and move his foot three inches to the left and touch the quarter inch of Watson’s exposed skin with his toes. There were twelve short pale hairs that glinted in the gaslight.
Sherlock read the agony columns for the detritus of crime. He said, “Boring.” What he meant was that the criminal classes had become incredibly boring with the death of Moriarty.
His friend smiled at him over his newspaper, which had stained the tips of his fingers with smudged ink. There was a faint smear of it on his left cheek.
Sherlock did not mention Moriarty. He did not push off his slipper. Full of so much furious motion, Sherlock sat still. That minute gave way to other minutes.
Until one evening, not long after Watson married for a second time, Sherlock met Mycroft at the Diogenes Club. Mycroft smiled from his deep chair and said, “Someone has to watch matters, Sherlock.” Under the Bay Rum of his aftershave, Mycroft smelled like death. Outside yellow snow fell on the great cesspit and the Diogenes Club reeked of wet wool. The scotch that Mycoft handed Sherlock tasted like a thousand years of compressed earth.
Sherlock said, “I wouldn’t have expected you to go mountain climbing.”
Mycroft replied, “Don’t be obtuse. I brought the mountain to me and put her in my employ.” They drank the scotch and outside the snow thick with coal dust fell down on London and all it contained.
Of the way the years passed and the world changed, much has already been written. And Sherlock, well, actually Sherlock did change. Just not in the normal ways. Sherlock had never much been one for the normal. If Mycroft changed, little was written and what was written has since been redacted.
.
Silver crept hair by hair onto Watson’s head. Sherlock counted them as it happened. Watson’s wife did not count them. Not the first wife, who had died during the Great Sulk and therefore had a disadvantage at counting anything. Nor the second wife, who had her own silver hairs to count.
Watson’s silver hairs were left to Sherlock. He counted them.
Moriarty II ran a criminal empire out of a cheerfully, brilliant, pink, monstrosity house by the sea in Brighton. She sent Sherlock taunting post cards by way of Waga-Waga and Beedie-Beedie all over painted with pretty pictures and traces of dissolved human hearts in the lingering perfume and florid purple ink. He said nothing to his Watson. Went to his meeting by the lapping sea. It was unsatisfying. She said, “The world is full of fools and we’re the only people in it. The rest are our reflections that we could make run and dance if we wanted,” and held out her diamond-ringed hand. Sherlock did not step forward onto the obvious trap door with its reek of lye. What followed next was entirely an accident. He did sigh and sourly curse overly complex architecture. At least there was successful arson.
Three days later, Sherlock chased a Powder Monkey that he was intent on foiling down cobbled streets. Watson was a solid shape a step behind and to the left. Until he stumbled and fell. Sherlock stopped and looked at his friend.
1. Watson had a recurring twinge in the leg where that Jezail bullet had made its intrusion.
2. The Powder Monkey had had red saponaceous clay and turkey excrement on his boots, which indicated that he’d been to the Scrubs.
3. Watson had slight tremble in his right hand. Sherlock stared at it to make it stop. The tremble remained.
4. It was now of greater efficiency to count the hairs that were not silver. Sherlock could not be bothered with efficiency.
Watson coughed out the words, “We lost him.” He blinked. He couldn’t see past Sherlock’s greasepaint and silver painted hair.
Sherlock glared at Watson’s hand. There were three more liver spots. He added that to the count. “No, he’s looking for a man about deworming turkeys.” He helped Watson to his feet. For those who are concerned, Sherlock did catch the Powder Monkey later that night in a cement building where he ground deworming crystals into his latest explosive mix. A high oxygen content being an explosion’s friend. The building went up and down in a purple cloud that Holmes washed out of his hair for weeks. Watson had insisted on following. His cough grew worse.
Sherlock retired. He tended to restless, buzzing, busy honeybees on the chalky downs and wrote a monogram. Tended to the Queen.
He didn’t retire. He fought war adjacent. Plucked secrets. Cracked codes. Went to Chicago and grew a beard that did not suit him. He experimented. He drank alcohol made in bathtubs. He tried “things” to dim and blunt and dull. But what of it. His body was an engine and his mind a machine.
Mycroft sent him a telegram. “Death does not always have a grace period.”
He went home to the London streets emptied of young men. To a low steady boom across the channel.
A young woman with bright eyes gave him a white feather as he walked down Fleet street. He twirled it between his fingers as the booms echoed. The feather was an dove feather. The symbolism was mixed. As they accumulated, he made a fan of them and sent it to his brother, who sent him a note and a badge in reply. “Not actually the entire government. However, will see a man about a ship.” Sherlock threw the note away, but he kept the badge for King and Country. It kept him from getting white feathers. He listened to the echoes and investigated a lost and found and stolen painting.
Moriarty III was all art. The Michelangelo of grift on a silk couch. It was a wonder he ever arranged anyone’s death. Sherlock never met him. Correspondence and the odd stolen government. Sherlock deducted, but in circles. Influenza found Moriarty III first. Sherlock stretched out on Moriarty’s silk couch in his empty house and flexed his toes in the patterned silk and said, “Pandemic.” Closed his eyes. “Dull.”
Lost generation. A generation lost.
Sherlock sought out those places of hellish cruelty, of hidden wickedness which went on, year in, year out. Which is to say, he went into the countryside. Pastoral pastiche. Mustard filled fields. Red poppies. Desolate farmhouses and perilous walks. Swam in seas thick with Lions Manes and prowled smuggler’s caves. He went into the desert as some do and came out much the same, if dustier. If slightly radioactive. But that was the world for you. Slightly more radioactive.
Moriarty IV toured and gave speeches. He filled self-actualization-transcendence centers full of people in white robes and wide smiles. Bullets each of them, which Moriarty IV aimed at will. Thieves fueled with a fury of conviction. Sherlock met with him in Santa Cruz when it was the serial killer capital of the world. They had arsenical dandelion wine in a cavern of faces. They weren’t carvings. Lost boys under the earth. Moriarity IV shouted his manifesto and the walls screamed his name. Moriarty spread his arms wide. “Doom am I, full-ripe, dealing death to the worlds, engaged in devouring mankind. Even without my slaying them not one of the warriors, ranged for battle against me, shall survive. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Sherlock sipped his arsenical wine. Moriarty did like to talk.
Moriarty IV also should have stopped with the fifth glass. His Mithridatism wasn’t quite all that he thought it was.
Sherlock met the imitations of himself. When he met the first one, he stared at him for three hours until the man broke and gushed a solid stream of deduction. Facts. His gift and curse. Broken. They were all broken. Sherlock flung himself down in a chair and put his hand over his face in a flounce to put all other flounces to talking about it. He got up. He deleted.
He spread his fingers over the side of a Compac luggable and caressed the word, “Delete", with his tongue. It felt good. The word delete. Dull criminals with insufficient imagination, he deleted them. The color of Doctor John Watson’s eyes. He deleted. The precise flush of red in his cheeks when the game was afoot. Deleted the steady stream of time.
Moriarty V was a computer program written by a bored fourteen year old boy. It was fairly brilliant and deadly and all its speeches were in long numeric flows. Until lightening struck (twelve times) and wiped out the backups.
Sherlock by now might have suspected that he was in competition with God, but he wasn’t the sort. He had seen the atom split after all.
Sherlock drained home to the cesspit. His landlady’s name was not Mrs. Hudson when he met her in bright sandy Florida. That was Mycroft’s little joke. That there was a Lestrade at (New) Scotland Yard, what of it. Son followed boring father as followed by boring son.
The fog was gone. The coal fire too. In its place, he’d grown a blur at the edges of his vision. Or sharp bright colors that cut the eyes. Memories that replayed. Watson nodding his head along to the memory of a song. Deleted as they occurred.
Bored. He was so very, very bored. Still. There were corpses to whip and he quite liked refrigeration and microwaves and smart phones. He liked smart things. He liked crime scenes. They had always been vivid.
He stood in the lab and held a pipette and in walked a man with a limp. Sherlock did not know him. Sherlock knew him. Hair and clothing and stance said military. Wounded. Doctor. Tanned. He heard the introduction and he thought the following along seven separate tracks, because by now he could think seven separate things at once.
1. Twenty-seven entries for John Watson in Wikipedia. John B. Watson, father of behaviorism. Discard.
2. Statistical probability that a doctor-soldier wounded in Afghanistan be named John Watson. 2006 Census data insufficient.
3. Dr. John Watson looked nothing like Dr. John Watson, which indicated that deletion of appearance had been ineffective. Inappropriate backups from tertiary drives?
4. Sherlock’s heart rate had increased by two beats per ten seconds. Interesting.
5. He had left his riding crop in the morgue. Inconvenient. A ghost of it hot in his hand.
6. John has a psychosomatic limp in his leg. Intriguing. Where then was his injury? Shoulder. Yes, shoulder. Interesting. Sherlock needed to see it. Even though, he’d never seen the first injury. Irrelevant.
7. John’s - not Watson’s - eyes fluttered in an ever patient sort of way. They would feel like pinned butterflies on Sherlock’s skin. Potential experiment? Yes.
He invited him home with a smile and wink. John came.
It was all very intriguing. Mycroft thought so too. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have flirted cameras at John. Faithful John.
Sherlock took John on a date and told him that he was married to his work. He loved the way his tongue curled around the word "married" and the word "work". Toil. Action. Motion. Movement. Change. John looked nothing like Watson, who had been a part and blood and bone to the work. Breathed in unison as they ran.
Sherlock left the candle behind to burn down on the table. John left his cane.
Psychosomatic. Echo. Interesting.
He looked at that cabbie and he knew that both pills were poison. Mithridatism. Always with the Mithridatism. Sherlock held the pill up to the light and he wanted to taste what it felt like to die. Crack. A hole in the glass. A hole in the cabbie. It felt like something not a hundred years away to push at the wound. Moriarty. VI. Sherlock smiled.
He was married to his work.
He lay on the couch and stretched. Brushed his fingers along the flocked patterns in the wallpaper. As he stared into the middle distance, he listened to John type slow and careful on his computer. In the corner of the room, on the third shelf, behind the jar of desiccated beetles, there was a box of papers written in long hand. He listened to John type. Could hear the echoed scratches as Watson had nibbed through a Study in Scarlet. Rache. Rachel. Red. Pink. Jeff Hope had been Moriarty VI’s idea of a calling card. A joke. To be killed by hope. Echoes.
This Moriarty wooed with tangled riddles.
On fire. Sherlock was on fire. Felt it dance on his skin. Fanned by the flutter of eyes on him. Wanted the gasped, “Incredible. Amazing.”
He’d learned and deleted that the earth went round the sun so many times. Deleted. Fire. Gravity. Fg = G (m1*m2)/(d^2). He’d had that in his head once. Deleted. Water. He was fire and there was only one solution.
He stared at the not-Vermeer and cocked his head. Wondered if he’d been right to delete everything about his great-uncle. A fragmented memory of his mother talking about brush strokes. A brush entangled with the feeling of playing his violin. Bow in hand. He degragmented his mind. Vernet and Vermeer were different painters. He played his violin. It was the song that Watson had twitched his foot to while a coal fire hissed. Sherlock stopped playing. He plucked discord on the strings instead.
He sat in his chair and he waited. He hated waiting. Watson. No, John, pulled him short. Caring about the dead wouldn’t solve the puzzle any faster. Sherlock sat and stared. Remembered stacks of bodies. Influenza. Delete. Somme. Delete. Songs. Sherlock’s arguments with Watson had been all devil’s foot and letting carbuncle thieves go before they ate the goose. This was now the moment he was in. John, who had been to war and returned, shone astonishment at him. Sherlock shut down three separate subroutines.
He went to the pool with the Bruce Partington Plans, because Mycroft did like his little jokes. Went to meet Moriarty and met Watson in a padded coat, which it took him sixty seconds to understand. In that sixty seconds, Watson was Moriarty and Sherlock thought along seven tracks:
1. Oh!
2. Oh!
3. Oh!
4. Oh!
5. Oh!
6. Oh!
7. Moriarty was more common than he thought. Doctor John Watson was so much harder to find.
John yelled at him to run. Held Moriarty to his chest in a strong embrace. Sherlock did not. Why would he run? Now of all times. Idiot.
They looked at each other. Red dots. Brilliant. Bright. Puffy coat on the floor. The flutter of John’s eyes. Of John Watson’s eyes. Sherlock recorded to the hard drive. Backups. He’d always had backups. Fired. Jumped. Boom.
The thing to remember about water was that it was both permeable and incompressible. If the explosives had been in the water that would have been unfortunate, but they were not. Boom.
The thing to remember about modern high velocity bullets was that they shattered on impact with water. It was all about surface tension. Jumping in a pool wouldn’t have helped with the low velocity bullet that shattered Watson’s clavicle and grazed his subclavicle artery. That had sliced through his leg. If there had been a pool at Maiwand. As there had been a pool at Reichenbach.
Sherlock had not yet seen John’s scar. Smelled it. Tasted it. Touched it. Never seen the place on his leg where there was no scar. Under the water, Sherlock resolved that that would not do.
It was brilliant and perfect and Sherlock was on fire. That was the problem. They were at the bottom of a pool. Fire needed oxygen.
It was a bit of a miscalculation. Bullets shattering on the surface of the water. Fine dust that fell like coal tainted snow on their skin. Sherlock felt it. The pressure of the water. The brush of liquid stirred by John’s hand motions to keep himself below the surface. Bubbles of air clung to John’s face. Sherlock could have stayed down there forever. Considered brushing his lips to John’s. Purely to share the air in his lungs. Purely. Sherlock only lied to himself on tracks one through six. On the seventh track, he told the truth. Not pure. Married. Blood. Bone. Breath.
Sirens wailed. They answered the call and surfaced. Gasped. There was no adolescent Swiss girl. Moriarty VI was gone in the permanent smear sort of way. A chunk of building too. John said, “That was incredible.” He looked at the carnage by the pool. He said, this moral steady man, “Good.” It was good. It was great. Grand. Incredible. John said, “Oh, God. I need to call Sarah.” Oh. That again.
They heaved themselves out of the water and staggered into the arms of Lestrade. Blood shot eyes. Weary. Lestrade. Nothing like Lestrade. Everything like a Lestrade.
Anti-climax. In the parking lot, Mycroft rolled his eyes at Sherlock and endured jokes about his weight that were sixty years out of context. They were their own context.
Watson went to see Sarah.
Sherlock sulked on the couch. He curled his toes into the soft cushions. Deleted thoughts about lips. Deleted the seventh track, which indexed a restore point. Curled on himself. He heard an echo. “Sherlock, you have to eat.” He felt the warmth of John next to him on the cramped couch. Not close enough to touch. Careful space. Sherlock wormed into it. He disrespected space between them.
He considered saying, “No, I don’t.” He considered saying, “No, I do not.” He considered saying nothing. Instead, he allowed himself to be handled.
Ate soup from a tin. It tasted like tin, which was clearly impossible because the tin only contained trace amounts of tin.
John asked, “Sherlock, why are all bowls full of dead rats?”
Sherlock swallowed soup. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn’t answer it. He ignored it. Magnificently. Profoundly. Significantly.
John sighed and fished the smart phone out of Sherlock’s silky-soft-brilliant-blue-dressing gown. A faint soft brush of three fingers against his hip bone through fabric. Sherlock did not breath in. His pupils did not dilate. He had more self control than that. The seventh track disagreed. He deleted it. Again.
John said, “It’s Lestrade. A man’s been found baked into a pie with twenty-four blackbirds in the middle of a comfort food convention.”
Sherlock sat up. He grinned. He shucked off the robe. Slid on the coat. Flourished. Dramatic scarf. Didn’t even have to beckon. John one step behind and to the left. He could feel the solid steady weight of him.
He went to the scene of the crime. He looked at the body in the pie. A body, which had been poisoned, stabbed, bludgeoned and then baked into a pie with a crust that used significant amounts of home made lard, before being briefly revived for exactly fifty-eight seconds based on the flail pattern in the crust, and then dead again. Sherlock smiled and thought the following seven thoughts:
1. John liked the Cornish pasties sold at the corner shop.
2. Sherlock had recently completed a series of experiments on the rats from the back ally regarding the ingestion of atropine derived from Mandragora officinarum.
3. Lestrade was questioning an American, vegetarian Piemaker, who kept his hands very firmly in his pockets and tried to appear a foot smaller than he was. An American woman in a very red dress stood next to the Piemaker. She smelled like death and urban honey. She was not wearing perfume. An American detective, who was nothing like Sherlock, yelled at Lestrade, “Hell no!”
4. John was very solid next to Sherlock. Currents of breath. A steady heart beat and a steady hand.
5. Watson had forgiven every trespass. John was very forgiving.
6. This was a very interesting case. Not the case itself, because clearly the King of Diamond Chestnuts had poisoned the dead man, the Knave of Clubs Cookies had bludgeoned him, and the Queen of Strawberry Heart-tarts had stabbed and baked him.
7. Moriarty was always less unique than he or she thought. That would useful. Sherlock did understand symmetry.
Experimentation was in order. Sherlock tossed a dead blackbird at the Piemaker. He caught it. The dead bird flew away. The Piemaker swallowed. A CCTV camera twitched in the corner of the room. John gaped and said, “Extraordinary!”
Sherlock smiled and considered encouraging John to have a savory pie for dinner. He considered the agony columns and where he might find another Moriarty. After all, seven was both a lucky and a safe prime. The seventh track recorded something else. Sherlock backed it up in memory and brushed the tips of his fingers along John’s warm and steady elbow as Sherlock guided John in the direction he wanted him to go.