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humpty dumpty sat on a wall
humpty dumpty had a great fall
“I'm sorry,” the man in the pinstripe suit, who calls himself the Doctor and speaks of the stars, says. “I'm so sorry, but this is a fixed point in time. What happens here must always happen.”
“There is no such thing as destiny,” Holmes says over the deafening roar of the waterfall.
“Of course there isn't,” the Doctor scoffs, and then softens as he says, “But there are things that will always have had to happen a certain way, and this, Sherlock Holmes at the Falls of Reichenbach in 1891, is one of them. You need to die here, so that you can come back in 1894.”
“And why should I believe you, Doctor?” Holmes asks, and his face contorts into a derisive grimace on the last word.
The Doctor looks sad, and his voice is gentle when he says, “Because you've known all along that this is the only way to keep John Watson safe.”
Holmes is silent for a long while, and his eyes are unreadable. “The Doctor isn't your real name,” he says eventually, and his voice is offhand and devoid of warmth. “It's merely a title you've adopted, either given by someone who held significance to you or chosen by yourself. The former would suggest that you have known at least one person who believed that you possess the ability to mend.”
The Doctor's voice is level when he asks, “And what does the latter suggest?”
“That you yourself believe that you have these abilities,” Holmes says, and then adds almost as an afterthought, “or at the very least wish to.”
“And which do you think it is?” the Doctor asks, and his features have morphed into something harder and less kind.
“I think you became the Doctor for the same reason any man becomes a doctor: to make people better.”
“And do they?” the Doctor asks, and what he means to say is did he.
“Obviously,” Holmes scoffs, and looks away.
The Doctor's smile is wide and fond, because through all of time and space people remember this: Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, and 221b Baker Street.
--
It is the fourth of May 1891, and when Watson reaches the precipice he is alone and finds only signs of a struggle and a quickly written note, and so this is the day Sherlock Holmes falls.
On the train back he shares a compartment with a man who wears strange clothes and says stranger things, and he doesn't really hear any of it.
“Trust me,” the man with he mad hair says, and touches his fingers to Watson's temples, “I'm a Doctor.”
John Watson sleeps and dreams of Detectives who do not die and companions that live forever in the hearts and minds of people who are not yet born, and when he wakes he is alone and it hurts.
all the king's horses and all the king's men
couldn't put humpty together again